When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose...

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation…

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in...

It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey...

USURY: Everybody’s looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management...

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a...

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust.

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

The planet is finished with us, at this point –

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules… afternoons are best, but I’m too lethargic for...

I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts–and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at...

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.

The future’s another country, man… And I still ain’t got a passport.

You look fine. – Right. I look fine. Except I don’t, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man’s nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect...

We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight a...

[..] as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy.For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the...

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.