Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.