Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.