Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.