The Government justifies keeping everyone else in poverty because people seem to work the hardest when they're right on the edge of survival.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

He looked at the piles of food again, and it was like he was seeing it with new eyes. This is wrong, he thought. Letting food rot while people die of hunger. It's evil.

I like to know what I'm celebrating before I put on a party hat.

...it’d be like looking for a needle in a burning haystack.' 'Oh, I’ve done that,' Mark said airily. 'It’s a game we used to play, after we got rid of all our livestock and didn’t need our hay no more. You throw a match into the haystack, give the fire a three-second head start, and begin looking. You can find the needle every time if you work quick

We'll have a 'rest of our lives' now.

A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.