I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time. |
I went many years without even associating Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. Then in the 1980s, when there was a new concern about CND and so on, Nagasaki took on this symbolic value. I felt my Nagasaki had been appropriated. It was suddenly this burning city of ashes. For me, it was where I lived until the age of 5. |
I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really. |
I work very regular hours, roughly 9 to 5:30. I think I have it much easier than a lot of parents. I just sit at home. |
I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family. |
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them. |
It is a protected world. To some extent at least you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not. |
It is only when you have discovered the other person's status that you know how to address and treat them. |
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory,. |
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. |
Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life. |
Never Let Me Go, |
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki. |
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me. |
People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different. |