“Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps.”

“There's a subtle difference between the man that lives like each day could be his last and the man who lives like there's no tomorrow.”

“...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

“So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.”

“It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.”