London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Writing is a solitary experience. I'm extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It's so intimate, I can't even share it with my wife.

By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

The needs of babies and toddlers were constant and drained the life out my sense of self and my family's relationship with each other.

By the time the children go to bed I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working car pooling building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.