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As soon as I heard there were people in Germany who wanted to restore the old part of Dresden, I wanted to help. Even before the Nobel, I had started this group, the Friends of Dresden. The destruction of Dresden made a big impression on me when I was a child, and I wanted to do this.

I decided to write a book primarily because people talked me into it.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

I wrote the book because I wanted to be able to share some things that I had learned and as pompous as that may sound, as you get to a certain point in life, you figure so what am I doing?

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.

Anything that I read, I read because I'm interested in it.

I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.