Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

I thought about moving south, about continuing to run, continuing to pretend I was alive. But it was, I knew now, much too late for that. There are doors, after all, between the living and the dead, and they swing in both directions.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.