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.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

It is the nature of walls that they should fall.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued...