We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.

If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.