I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!