Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way.

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.