I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.

It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Routine kills creative thought.

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.