What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.

...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.

I think a lot of the questions - questioning reality and the self and the desire to change, to me are always at the heart of life. No matter how old you are, to me life is always about changing and growing and discovering and that's not always easy.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.