Love is everything it's cracked up to be

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.