I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

This is the only country in the world, that worries about what it is. The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.