Your room is not your prison. You are.

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists