Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.