I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

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.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

What you eat is the most political thing you do every day

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.