All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes.

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable