Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.

At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?