Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.

She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.

I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.