We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.