All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.