Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying 'I probably won't hit you with a shovel.' Suddenly everyone is afraid you will do the opposite.

I always think it's silly when people talk about works of culture taking risks. Because there's not any risk involved.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.

I don’t smoke, although it looks fantastic in films. But I light matches on those thinking blank nights when I crawl my route out onto the roof of the garage and the sky while my parents sleep innocent and the lonely cars move sparse on the faraway streets, when the pillow won’t stay cool and the blankets bother my body no matter how I move or lie still. I just sit with my legs dangling and light matches and watch them flicker away.

But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not. We can ask for someone who will say, “You are noble enough,” and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt.

The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.

A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says.