Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.

He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State