We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn't start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.

People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.

We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.

Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well-- here is the truth-- you have to talk yourself out of it.