One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

I am 46, and have been for some time past.

Death is only a small interruption.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.