The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

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 world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.