Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.