If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?