I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.