Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

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

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.

If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

No amount of promises can guarantee love