A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

I feel even less patience with transsexuals.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Having 'best friends' is - at least for me - as outdated and small-minded a concept as the idea of 'Sunday best clothes.'

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase "consumer society" used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.