You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.

Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.