You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it's just because you're still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.