“As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the cafe at couple after couple, eaching confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.”

“It’s like that, isn’t it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, ‘The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off,’ It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he’d ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentiment self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the ‘relationships’ that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years. ”

“Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?”

“After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self murderers -- they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit.”

“Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit."[Ten rules for writing fiction (part two), The Guardian, 20 February 2010]”

“If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.”

“And she withdraws through the double, ceiling-high doors, which are really the only original feature left in this heavily converted apartment. And isn't the same true of me? All that was once me has been dispersed through the flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The 'I' has been partitioned off, remodelled, resurfaced and re-insulated, so that it cannot even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety per cent of house dust is dead human skin – and that's me. Dust on a windowsill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.”