The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.