Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.

Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.

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

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?