“Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.”

“The lives and deaths of characters in stories and poems, however tragic, help us to learn about the world and - if we are brave enough - to change it.”

“Hundreds of young barefoot, long-haired, newly converted believers flocked to the church, and they brought their guitars with them.”

“We don't want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above...”

“there was something about being alone in places that were usually filled with people that made them seem particularly empty when it was just you.”

“Jim Reston: And of course when that moment came--no words came to my mouth, and I shook his hand. Because if you've spent that long hating a man--in the end--a kind of relationship develops. An intimacy. Biographer and subject. Assassin and target.”

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”