The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
I've always seen places as being very deeply connected to the experience that people have in those places. I think that probably comes through very much in my books.
I get very attached to places.
The mammalian brain evolved exquisite place memory because that was essential for survival. This is why squirrels have such a good memory for where they buried their nuts.
I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.
The four places I've called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
Sometimes you remember more about the location where you shot the film than the film itself.
As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball.
There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.
If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.
I was in Kenya when I read 'Catch-22,' and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya - whenever I think of 'Catch-22,' I think of Nairobi.
