Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.