I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?