You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.