Please, God, send me something to adore.

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

You can't find peace by avoiding life.

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.