From A Good Book, I Want To

As A Teenager, I Was Always This Strange Mixture Of Kind Of Vice-captain Of The Rugby Team And Sensitive Artist Type The Rest Of The Time. I Was Sent Away To This Public School In The Middle Of Nowhere, And I Think We Managed To Completely Miss Out On Normal Youth Culture.

And When You Look At The Sky You Know You Are Looking At Stars Which Are Hundreds And Thousands Of Light-years Away From You. And Some Of The Stars Don’t Even Exist Anymore Because Their Light Has Taken So Long To Get To Us That They Are Already Dead, Or They Have Exploded And Collapsed Into Red Dwarfs. And That Makes You Seem Very Small, And If You Have Difficult Things In You Life It Is Nice To Think That They Are What Is Called Negligible, Which Means They Are So Small You Don’t Have To Take Them Into Account When You Are Calculating Something.

If You Enjoy Math And You Write Novels, It's Very Rare That You'll Get A Chance To Put Your Math Into A Novel. I Leapt At The Chance.

At 20, 25, 30, We Begin To Realise That The Possibilities Of Escape Are Getting Fewer. We Have Jobs, Children, Partners, Debts. This Is The Part Of Us To Which Literary Fiction Speaks.

He Was Asking Too Many Questions And He Was Asking Them Too Quickly. They Were Stacking Up In My Head Like Loaves In The Factory Where Uncle Terry Works. The Factory Is A Bakery And He Operates The Slicing Machines. And Sometimes A Slicer Is Not Working Fast Enough But The Bread Keeps Coming And There Is A Blockage. I Sometimes Think Of My Mind As A Machine, But Not Always As A Bread-slicing Machine. It Makes It Easier To Explain To Other People What Is Going On Inside It.