There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

When anything can happen, everything matters.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.