I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.

I thought maybe I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner.

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.

When I want to be incognito, I don't wear any hat. Unfortunately, even without the hat, they now recognise me in Paris.

When you have a lot of success you don't need vanity any more.

I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening.

I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.

Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me.

There is always room for coincidence.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

I try to keep a balance between conceptional or intellectual comprehension and emotional understanding.

It is important for me that a certain depth and variety of both exist next to each other. I am very careful not to sacrifice the one for the other.

Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out.

Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy.

I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.