Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

It might be tough, but my dad used to say, tough times don't last — tough people do.

Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.

On the clarity of your ideas depends the scope of your success in any endeavor.

There's a perception that British pies suffer from mediocrity, and historically they have. We're trying to re-educate people about what pie is.