People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won't drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that's fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.