All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

There were moments when I felt seriously unhinged; when I was convinced that I would never, ever recover from what had happened, when it was absolutely clear to me that life from this point on would be constant agony.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them--not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

Words matter, words have import.