If what we make comes back to haunt us, to define us and alter us, well, then, hadn’t we better be very careful what we create?

Remember this: every man has to find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. I believe that. You just have to find out what it is you’re looking for.

You will never find it,” his ghost says. “What?” “What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.

One final time I told myself I wasn’t abducting my little brother.

Orwell’s vision of our terrible future was that world – the world in which books are banned or burned. Yet it is not the most terrifying world I can think of. I think instead of Huxley –... I think of his Brave New World. His vision was the more terrible, especially because now it appears to be rapidly coming true, whereas the world of 1984 did not. What’s Huxley’s horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read one.

To see yourself on camera is not a natural thing, a thing no normal person is comfortable with; for it shows us as others see us, not as who we believe we really are.

I am scared almost all the time. But I never tell anyone. I can’t afford to. I have to go on pretending I’m this confident person, because if I don’t, if I’m quiet, I become invisible.

Even the dead tell stories.

Home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it’s made of memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

There never was a story that was happy through and through.