A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.