The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.
How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.
Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.
Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!
Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.
A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.