Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

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.

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.