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

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.

Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

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".

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?