He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.