Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.
Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well – here is the truth – you have to talk yourself out of it.
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.