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I have always been interested in the concept of ruin.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

We moralize among ruins.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

I have ideas all of the time from the beginning, but they never really wind up turning out like I thought they would.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

We built 'Jade Empire,' then we built 'Mass Effect,' then we built 'Dragon Age.' With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore, or you drown!