Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked. 'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.
'Rozabal' was theological while 'Chanakya' is political. Unlike 'Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of 'Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.
I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.
In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.
I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.
History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.
Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.
I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.
I don't much like Singapore. It's very big, very modern and very urbanised. As a rule, I prefer older places where you get a sense of the history.
France and America have a long history of mutual loathing and longing. Americans still dream of Paris; Parisians still dream of the America they find in the movies of David Lynch.
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
I had been raised in the church, but I wasn't a Christian. I had a lot of head knowledge but no heart knowledge.
If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.
I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.
When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.
