You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.