Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.