You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.