Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.

No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.

I worry sometimes that I'm a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that's dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.

The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.

I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.

But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama.