I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

...clatter of a typwriter suggests that you're actually building something.

The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

I like books on tape, and will listen to just about anything.

The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

Thank god I'm in England, because if I lived in any other country, it'd probably be the Philippines. Because with Rodrigo Duterte as the leader they couldn't really give me attitude on Donald Trump.