Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

Home is the first refuge from - and last defense against - the disappointments and the terrors of life.

It's only life. We all get through it.

As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.

Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed.

Reality isn't what it used to be.

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.