That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.