“In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.”

“I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.”

“The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.”

“Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”

“Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination.Nothing will come of nothing unless it's the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin.”

“You said five little words to someone--How can I help you?--and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.”

“She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”