When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote about this fabulous city. Of Fyodor Dostoevsky who had Saint Petersburg. Of Lawrence Durrell who had Alexandria. Of course, James Joyce invented, in a way, a fabulous Dublin. I had in mind, by writing, to appropriate my own city. If I couldn’t find an interesting real city, I should invent it. So, in a way I recreated Bucharest, and, in another way, I invented it. If you come to Bucharest, you will very soon realize that it has little to do with its image in my novels. I’ve invented much of it. I tried to create a coherent image of, as I call it in my novel, “the saddest city in the world”, a city full of ruins, a city full of images of the old glory which is no more. I made Bucharest in my own image, in my own personality. I tried to transform it into some sort of alter ego or a twin brother. I projected myself on the very eclectic architecture of this city, which has several layers of history and architecture.

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Now we’ve arrived at the problem of how I write and this, in my opinion, is very interesting because I don’t know any other writer who does that. I write by hand, without any plan, without a synopsis. My way of writing is a pure and continuous inspiration. Let’s say, today I’m in the middle of a novel and I have to write one page or two like every day. What I do is, I read the page I wrote on the previous day and I try to write in the same key, like a musician. On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and the course of the novel. 

It’s madness to write like that, without knowing what you’re going to put on the next page. It’s like using a 3D printer to make a car, not by assembling all its parts, but by making the lights at the front of the car first, then the windscreen, then the seats, then the engine, everything up to the back of the car instead of making everything at once. I have to have enormous faith in what my mind can do because otherwise you cannot write like this. It’s writing like a poet, not like a prose writer. 

Of course, when you write this way you can fail very, very easily because on each and every page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all demanding a decision. But here is the trick: it’s not you who decides but your mind. Your mind knows better than you do what it is going to do and where it wants to go. It’s like a horse running a race: the jockey doesn’t win the race – the race is won by the horse. The jockey should be very small, very light, and should only touch the horse in very few places. The ideal would be that the jockey doesn’t touch the horse at all, that he just flies above it. It’s your horse, your mind that wins the race, not you. You are the small person that guides the horse, nothing else.

So, I usually let my mind work. I do not touch my book but let it flow in every direction, wherever it wants to go. I’m only the portal, the medium, nothing but the voice of someone inside, and it is this person who actually dictates this book. Sometimes, it feels as if the text is already written on the page and I only remove the white stripes that cover the words. I just erase them and let the text appear. (interview)