We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.

I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex - a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.