My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

What better place to kill time than a library?

For it must be very lonely being dead.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.