What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

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

I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.