There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.