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

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.