So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.