Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

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.

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.