"This is going to sound really childish, but I've been intrigued by Romania ever since the 1976 Olympics, when Nadia Comăneci, the little gymnast, scored a perfect 10. And I thought any country that gave that to the world had to be wonderful, so I read up a lot on it. When the 1989 revolutions broke out, I remember cheering them on. They were the last ones to make a bid for freedom, and it was the bloodiest and the most spectacular of the revolutions. It was almost French in its drama, like the French Revolution."

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“I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. Notes marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didn't too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but . . . If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldn't give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isn't my job to get published . . . it is my job to write.”

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