“I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.”

“I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.”

“Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”

“I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

“It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.”

“I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

“I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”