This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting you.

You have to jump into disaster with both feet.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end - people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power.