I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

I find people confusing.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.