Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.