If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.