She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occassionally, the need to define myself as something-or-the-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexul, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, most regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not ANYTHING.