I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

Love is the use one makes of another.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.