Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

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