If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

The wind always brings us back to the same wall

I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.

It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.

Guilleaume left La Praline with a small bag of florentines in his pocket; before he had turned the corner of avenue des Francs Bourgeois I saw him stoop to offer one to the dog. A pat, a bark, a wagging of the short stubby tail. As I said, some people never have to think about giving.