I think part of being human is learning to roll with the punches, to deal with any kind of personal or professional disaster that might crop up. You have to learn to deal with that stuff or not survive.

My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.

I don't write to create performance material; I write to make books.

Only recently have I realized that being different is not something you want to hide or squelch or suppress.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I had a vision of bringing two cultures together, and I have said this in the past: my goal is to bring Morocco and India together through music and art.

I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.