"I would see something strange and mysterious, and treat it as normal ... Shanghai struck me as a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left the real world far behind. There was always something odd and incongruous to see ... Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold. In many ways it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of my fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory."