Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

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

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses