If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.

Would we be the heroes or the cowards of the piece? Would we follow orders or stick to our principles, if those two things ever conflicted? Would we be the brave ones who still found the capacity for love - and for laughter - even while we were terrified?

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.

You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.

It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.