What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

Belgium is a country with a split personality.

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.

I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears.

There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.

The Belgians tend to downplay the cultural divide issue, and the far-right issue, but there's a staggering degree of casual racism in Belgium, much worse than in the UK.

I liked myself better when I wasnt me.

I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think about today..." "No, that's giving up... I'm still hpoing that yesterday will get better.

To me, any kind of filmmaking that's reactive is not going to be as good as something more inventive and original.

All government is founded on compromise and banter.

I am the one I have been looking for.

Interview with a Vampire' made vampires sexy.

This is a love story. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things. I never knew there were so many different ways to say goodbye.

One blob of red in the wrong place and the audience isn't looking at the hero, they're looking at a patch of curtain (or something similar) and your whole effect is lost.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having... money in the bank.