Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.