“Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air.”

“I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal.”

“Out the other side of sex and love and all that torment.”