There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.