Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

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.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

Do you miss her?' 'Who? Emma? Of course. Every day. She was my best friend.

As a matter of fact, I think there are more things important in life than "relationships.

She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.

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