Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.