“My favourite setting is Italy, specifically Venice, because it is there that I met my husband, who is Venetian. I used it as the setting for Virtue and Vice, Enchantment in Venice, and Seduced by Innocence. Apart from Venice, my favourite city is Rome.”

“Venice is a quantum city, a Schroedinger's cat of a map.”

“My favourite setting are England, because I was born here and love it, and Spain, because it's fabulous and so romantic.”

“I had had my dreams of Venice. But nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.”

“Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.”

“Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.”