You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

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.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.