He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

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

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.