If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.