“Fuck it; put it in a bucket, and take it to the stage!”

“As always, she was carrying the washing. Rudy was carrying two buckets of cold water, or as he put it, two buckets of future ice.”

“Five stage. Clinger. Totally not fucking cool!”

“If somebody pushed you down a well, I’d rush over and toss you a bucket, because I’m fucking thirsty.”

“This is the thing that takes me longest of all when I'm beginning a novel, to work out what the limits are, what the powers of the narrator will be, what is the appropriate tone to take. And where do I see things from: am I watching this, as it were, from stage right or stage left? That makes a difference. Mike Alfreds is an English director who has a company called Shared Experience. They do a lot of adaptations of novels. He's discovered that when they use a narrator, if they put the narrator stage right, the audience perceives the narrator as being somehow involved, warm, part of what's going on. If he puts the narrator stage left, the audience feels the narrator to be critical, detached....Ever since then, I have to say, whenever I do a conversation with someone on the stage, I take care to be stage right. But that's an aspect of where you're seeing it from, you see, whether the narrator is viewing the characters, as it were, sympathetically or, as it were, critically. This takes a while to discover for each book.”

“The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one.”