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

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?

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

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.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.