During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.

Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone' -it's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

People, it turns out, aren't a product of their own time. They're a product of the time before theirs

Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.