I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake

In the end, it’s all a question of balance.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.

There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.