Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.