“Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.”

“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.”

“In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs -- to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed, if it is summer.”

“For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.”

“I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence.”

“If publishers are here, I've got a feeling they will agree with whatever I say because the publishing houses are packed full of people who love literature and whose hearts are being broken all the time by what happens, by the reign of the accountants.There is a phenomenon which I call the Educated Barbarian. This is someone who could have been in school or university for many years, could have won prizes by the score, and at the end has read nothing, knows no history, and above all is totally incurious. Quite a large number of my young friends are like this. They're all utterly delightful. We have a wonderful time together. We gossip, we go shopping. We chat about our friends, but at the slightest mention of anything literary their eyes glaze over. Looking back at my misspent youth, I can remember people who were not particularly literary. They were not even very educated, but they would take for granted that they should have read War and Peace. They did not say, "Oh this is so difficult. Oh this is too long and I don't understand the long words." They just read it. That's what people were like then.”

“So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy.”