Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?' She nodded. 'The firing squad.' 'That's not the whole truth. Try again.' 'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness. 'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.' He was silent for several minutes. 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' 'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

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.

You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.