As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.

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

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

I'm not the consolation prize, Dex. I'm not something you resort to. I happen to think I'm worth more than that.

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.

And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others

Envy was just the tax you paid on success.