World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps

What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.

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.

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

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

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

Time had changed the magical to mundane