Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman's body?

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

I'm a really hectic dreamer, I never wake up not out of a dream and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises.

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.