The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.

Life's about a hell of a lot more than being happy. It's about feeling the full range of stuff: happiness, sadness, anger, grief, love, hate. If you try to shut one of those off, you shut them all off. I don't want to be happy. I know I won't live happily ever after. I want more than that, something richer. I want to go right up close to the beauty and the ugliness. I want to see it all, know it all, understand it all. The richness and the powerty, the joy and the cruelty, the sweetness and the sadness. That's the best way I can honour my friends who died.

The dreams now were simply of staying alive.

Name three types of olives." "Olives! I wouldn't know one type!" "Well, there are three. You can get green ones, you can get black ones, or you can get stuffed.

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

the biggest risk is to take no risk. or to take crazy risks.

Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.