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

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.

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

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

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

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

He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.