The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

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

I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it

We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.