I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men -- one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf -- and it'll look up expectantly.

I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.

It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks often cause problems.