Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.

I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.