The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.