“The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.”

“I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.”

“I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.”

“Don't worry so much about 'not supposed to'.”

“I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.”

“I'd rather be a freak than a clone.”

“If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.”

“We didn’t see anyone that day. We had no expectations. Everything was spontaneous. There wasn’t a single moment of stress. We laughed like crazy all afternoon – though I couldn’t tell you what about. And there was definitely something in the air – call it magic if you like – because that was the happiest Christmas any of us could remember, which makes me think that perhaps, like luck, magic is something we can make for ourselves. It isn’t something you can buy. It doesn’t come as standard. And you don’t need to plan, or to overspend, or to wrack your brains trying to come up with some extraordinary way to celebrate. Because sometimes it’s the little things that bring us the greatest pleasure.”

“And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.”

“No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.”

“Knowledge is currency here....”