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

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

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.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.