“You don't have to feel love to give it.”

“I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level. ”

“People say they want to read about life but that's not what they want at all. They want a version of life. Don't you realize, someone else's version of someone else's life is still fiction? It's still a story. But it has no imagination. That's what you people have done. You've murdered imagination.”

“And you walk or wheel to this place here when you feel sad? On your walks? Or wheels? This is a sad place. More sadder it could turn you.”

“I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come.”

“So much is invisible.”

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” -Albert Camus”