Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.
Things don't so much end as disappear. They don't so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don't just mean the dying.
It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday - walking your partner's dog, putting on your shoes - and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.
But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.
The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything...
I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's s...
It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and...
If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope.
The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.
If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there.
...People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.
Actors go inside the heads of other people and are not afraid of the complicated places you can find yourself.
On television, it's all just shiny, successful people, and so I feel somebody has to wave a flag for the ordinary people who are not quite sure that they are getting it right.
I think lots of ideas are sometimes in our heads without us quite, you know, knowing it.
I think I'm somebody who takes praise with a very big - probably too big - pinch of salt.
For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to.
The story of Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage began as an afternoon play for radio. For many years, I have been writing plays and adapting novels for 'Woman's Hour' and the 'Classic' series. So this was originally a three-hander play, broadcast...
I have written stories since I was a child.
I am not expecting anyone to feel sorry for me, but when friends ask how it feels to be a debut novelist who has also been long listed for the Man Booker prize, I have to admit that my response has confused me. I am so overwhelmed, so delighted, so h...
My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.
