In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.