I Think It's Quite Difficult To Understand

When I Got To 40 Or So... I Had The Sense When I Looked Back Over My Life I Would Actually See A Mess Of Decisions, A Few Of Which I Had Thought About, Some Of Which I Had Sort Of Stumbled On, And Many That I Had No Control Over Whatsoever.

So Why Not Become A Mongrel? It's Healthy

Because Maybe, In A Way, We Didn't Leave It Behind Nearly As Much As We Might Once Have Thought. Because Somewhere Underneath, A Part Of Us Stayed Like That: Fearful Of The World Around Us, And No Matter How Much We Despised Ourselves For It--unable Quite To Let Each Other Go.

I Discovered That My Imagination Came Alive When I Moved Away From The Immediate World Around Me.

I Want My Words To Survive Translation. I Know When I Write A Book Now I Will Have To Go And Spend Three Days Being Intensely Interrogated By Journalists In Denmark Or Wherever. That Fact, I Believe, Informs The Way I Write - With Those Danish Journalists Leaning Over My Shoulder.