All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.

Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.

My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.