This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.