May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

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

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?