Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.