My stories were not very good. They didn’t have much of a story line, and, in the way of all serious fiction, they ended with the untimely deaths of everyone.

A new adaptation of Jane Eyre came out every year, and every year it was exactly the same. An unknown actress would play Jane, and she was usually prettier than she should have been. A very handsome, very brooding, very ‘ooh-la-la’ man would play Rochester, and Judi Dench would play everyone else.

Once a book has left the brain of the author, it took on a life of its own, and served as the only liaison between the reader and the author. If you read carefully, the book could tell you all sorts of secrets-sometimes about its characters, and sometimes about its creator.

Isn’t there some truth in all fiction?” “There’s some fiction in all truth too.

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them – even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.

There was no romantic ending for Charlotte, but that’s where writing your own novel can be so useful.

Regret is made obsolete by the story you tell.

People evaporated in alcohol, the way people evaporated in dreams.

The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you’d marry a man for.

We entered a vast, bottomless silence. I scrambled for better conversation topics. This all would have been far less stressful in the movie version of our lives. The long silences would have been edited out.