Every love story is a potential grief story.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?