I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether...

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it's a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.

There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.

They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away. They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm...

I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I'm doing, I'm thinking of you. That's all I'll be doing. Nothing else.

In Frank I have found something beyond me, beyond my understanding, this is where some incredible core of me is destined to be even if not in this life.

The deeper into the sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was...

Now I see my children and I know that they are figures in a lantern show, that their sense of permanence is an illusion, because all around us time is unstoppable.

Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour.

In God's name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance.

I've missed you, Frank.''I haven't breathed since you left.

Cheers,' she said as I left, 'and don't forget you're seeing Matt and I on Monday.'I thought for a moment she'd said 'matineye', an East End pronunciation of 'matinee'. Was I meant to review it

It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer's billiard table.

How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and...

she had discovered that ageing and what they called "maturity" were myths, that all the years did was disqualify you from various pleasures, one by one.

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

She had grown accustomed to people's responses to her. Many of them assumed that there was a polar choice between marriage and work and that the more enthusiastically she had embraced her job, the...