The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

The perfect bacon sandwich is on white bread, very soft and very thick. Sourdough with a good crust. The bacon is half way to being crispy - and there's lots of it - and enough brown sauce to trickle down your arm. You've not really enjoyed a bacon sandwich unless 10 minutes later you're still licking your wrists.

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

It's never over till it's over with a friend.

Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it's very exciting to see the flames. That's lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can't cook on those flames.