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

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?

In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

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?

Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.

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