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.

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

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

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.

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.

Words matter, words have import.