Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.