there was not much distinction between losing a friend and a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumph, and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

The right idea is the one you can't stop thinking about; the one that's in your head first thing in the morning.

There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.

I love meeting my readers - so the more I can talk to at one event the better!

What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.