I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is now fourteen, and, while he gives little sign of doing what Lord Rochester planned to do at the same age, there are nonetheless changes afoot. Harry's voice, like that of his best friend, Ron (Rupert Grint), sounds like the mating cry of an oboe, and, worse still, the two cease to be best friends.

That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

We are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.