I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

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

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

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