days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

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