Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.

Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.

Act quickly, think slowly.

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.