If I had my life to live over, I'd have fewer meetings and more rendezvous.
I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.
Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
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'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.
Belgium is a country with a split personality.
I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.
The subject I liked best was painting, but the teachers didn't approve of my experiments and sometimes criticized me in front of the whole class. Maybe my love for photography came from that humiliation: a photo is something that you develop and print yourself, in the dark, and that remains in the dark until you decide to show it.
On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.
There are complete men and incomplete men. If you would be a complete man, put all of your soul's strength into all of your life's actions.