You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defenses. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it's difficult with old friends; difficult because it's so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged. 'Nothing's perfect.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.