…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.

You must do what you enjoy.

Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.