Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.