In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.