Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.