I try hard not to preach, but I get carried away, which is a mistake, but it's a risk worth running.

Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body.

I resent the creation of a world in which beauty is a reminder of what we're losing rather than a celebration of what we have.

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I'd never used it. I'm 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition - and I have never suffered from it.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.