WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

A real diamond is never perfect.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.