Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don't notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime is finished. Then it hits you--the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It's like I've been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full." p. 265

A new car is not going to change your life.

I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.

You know how if you're born in a certain situation you always expect your life to run on a steady trajectory? I've never really had a sense of that. I assume that life is going to go up and down.

The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.

I don't want to get hung up on what 'people,' that nebulous mass, think about me. That's the way to unhappiness, I think.

I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.