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

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

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

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.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.