She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.

Maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager.

You've got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it's unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it'll be a cyanide capsule.

It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.

She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.