If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation they're inseparable.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

People take conventional ways that other people have always decorated their cars, and use them as ways of giving other people permission to approach them.

For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

People die', she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.

Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.