She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.

To start with, look at all the books.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older." "Why's that?" the girl asked. "It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.