She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

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

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.