Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

I think writers are very anxious.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

When we forgive, our emotions evolve and reveal the futility of carrying the baggage of anger, antipathy, hostility and hatred. We emerge out of those dark corridors of fear, angst and insecurity.

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend.

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

All I want is the defining moment.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

Every concrete object has abstract value, is timeless in the dream parallel.

I love cartoons. So when they came to me to make Ice Age and this sequel, I was so happy.

Different isn't evil, it's just different.

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.

Each moment of the year has its own beauty.