Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you chose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. We don’t make choices so much as choices...

If you roll a pearl around your mouth it slowly reveals the dreams of oysters, memories of the sea, the taste of orgasm.

The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.

I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.

Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.

Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.

We have no obligation other than to be ourself. Your friends, your family, the daily beat of life will shape you into a form pleasing to them. Your job is to make something pleasing to...

When I was 6 I wanted to be a nurse. When I was 14 I wanted to be a spy or a lion tamer. When I was 16 I wanted too be a highwire walker...

Always say yes and try before you say no.

We are drawn to repetition. We can watch the tide rolling for hours into shore. The clouds skittering across the sky. We can listen to the pulsing beat of bongo drums and are drawn magnetically...

Writing is like a religion to those who don’t practise, an act of faith for those who do.

Reading releases you from the limits of yourself.

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write...

If sex is a journey, orgasm is the both the purpose and journey’s end.

I’m my characters’ galley slave.

The hardest thing in the world is to be original. It seems like our heads are filled with banalities and clichés. You have to keep digging deeper and deeper to try and find a fresh...

Every time you have an orgasm an angel comes to life..

If you are not happy with everything you have you become everything you lack.

The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the...

Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to...

A rubber doll with a microchip can imitate human flesh without human feeling. Porn leaves an emptiness inside. Erotica sets up a vibration in the mind that sends pulsing waves through the body.

Today is a black day. Tomorrow it may be white. You may look beautiful one day, and not the next. It is not only a matter of other people’s perceptions, it’s about our own perceptions....

There is a word I have always avoided in my writing, my life, my thoughts. That word is love. What does it mean? How do you deal with it? If you find it and lose...

You enter a book as if you are setting out on a journey and, if it is a good book, you will be a different person when you reach the end.

Love enters us like a vague ailment. Your head spins. Your underarms tingle. Love hurts and love has consequences: marriage, babies, separation, longing, human complications.

There is a kind of truth in a well-told lie. When we look back, we don’t see things as they were but how we would like them to have been.

The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town at night. I curled into the chair where he...

Art in order to move you has to be political or sexual – whether it is on canvas, in the drum of the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn’t move you,...

It is in the nest of disappointment where depression lays its eggs.

The touch of his fingertips on my back is like a great cellist brushing the strings of his instrument, or a watchmaker turning a tiny screw invisible to the naked eye. The feeling is erotic,...

It’s fun being a girl.

Sex exists in the now without past or future. If, for a single second, your minds drifts back to the past or forwards into the unknown, the moment withers like a dead plant and the...

In life there are perfect moments. You cannot plan them – the very act interferes with the laws of the universe – but you must be ready to recognise them when they come.

I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn’t sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile.

Love is possession, a sort of vanity.

To listen to criticism and act on it if it is valid and ignore it if it is not is a sign of intelligence.

When you cut the cords on the safety net and walk out on the highwire, you become yourself and become all that you can be and all that you were meant to be. But first,...

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and...

You don’t feel yourself falling in love, like it’s a journey, a process; on the contrary, it hits you like a sudden ague, a fever, the realisation that your life will never be the same...

Anything added can be subtracted; anything verbose can be simplified; anything missing can be found. Manuscripts are not books but negatives waiting for the fixer that turns them into prints.

When you remove love from sex you enter a mansion with many rooms shaded in nuance and excess, an invitation to peel away all conventions and programming. A chance to explore your hidden self. You...

When you can cross the highwire without falling off, you are in a state of perfect balance, perfect grace. It is the same with obedience. When you submit, submit totally, you enter that same equilibrium,...

And as he walked through the snow his footsteps disappeared behind him. He felt at that moment that he was coming from nowhere and going nowhere, that life isn’t a dream or a fantasy, it...

Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.

There is a moment when time stops, when the air grows still, when you enter a state of nothingness, a state of purity and perfection. That is the moment to strive for.

Somewhere, incredible things are happening. The trick is, not to go out and find where those things are happening, but to go out and make them happen.

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don’t belong...

An attractive woman becomes beautiful when she’s happy and in love.

After making love there is nothing like making love, slowly, idly, like walking without a destination, or swimming in a warm sea.

It is at night when sleep like the outgoing sea leaves you dry and cold and the morning light arrives like a small punishment.