As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It's somewhat controversial and has met some resistance.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.