Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.

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.

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.

If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes - as long as one knew where to look for it.

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.