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

My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

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

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.