For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.

The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked...that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said. "Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats." Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked, "or breast?