The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.