I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed... If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.