To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

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

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.