I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

Things are not what they seem.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.