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.

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.

We make our own destiny, not because we can see the road ahead, but because we cannot see the road ahead. It is the road, the motion, the forward movement, that takes us to ourselves.

Love is the colour of spring sunshine muted through old windows. Love has a taste, a texture – dark chocolate with pistachios; a sound – wind chimes echoing from a distant hill; a rhythm –...

Happiness is achieving your goals. Contentment is not having any.

Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.

When it happened I was terrified. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was a cliche. I looked at myself in the mirror and in my eyes was a look I had never seen before:...

If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being.

When it happens it happens instantly. It’s like diving into a pool of warm silky water, like flying through the air on invisible wings, like shedding an old skin and growing a new one. When...

If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.

He said: I don’t like to read. And I said, honey, you haven’t found the right girl.

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.

Love is like being on a small boat in the middle of the sea with no compass and no one to rely on except each other.

Falling in love is like falling from a high cliff into a warm silky sea, the falling is like flying and the landing is like a glimpse of the divine.

Girls love kissing. Our lips replicate the lips we discreetly hide. We redden lips to show the health and allure of our labia, the welcoming of your tongue in our mouth a foretaste of lips...

Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a...

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, a miracle, uniquely human. A kiss beneath the mistletoe. A kiss after midnight. A kiss before dying. The devil’s kiss. As a picture tells a thousand words, so...

I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than...

I was always in love with love and now I am in love. In love, everything looks different. Everything tastes different. It is as if you have been reborn, transformed, become another person whom you...

I had come to the conclusion that everyone took sex far too seriously. I mean, it’s only sex.

Who knows why we do it? And when we’ve done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That’s what makes a writer a writer.

Beauty lies between the erotic and the tragic.

Inside our mind there is hidden place that contains the mind within the mind. There, you will find another version of yourself that may be your true self. We do not find that self by...

You wait and wait, you get used to waiting. But when your time comes, you must not miss it.

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, uniquely human. A kiss before midnight. A kiss before dying. The Judas kiss. The kiss of the devil. A big wet smacker beneath the mistletoe. More can be...

I had avoided writing about love. I had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine – the taste of love to...

Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are...

You can cross the Rubicon in a boat without getting wet, but surely, getting wet is the baptism before you begin that new life on the other side.

There is a sense that we are waiting for something, that however wonderful something is, there is something else waiting to tempt us; however perfect someone is, someone else might be better, more suitable, more...

Mummy became a shadow, a woman who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going...

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the...