Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to come and time is the iron bars of a prison

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.

Beautiful girls are not a decoration, arm candy, an object. They are, whether they know it or not, the very essence of our humanity.

Beautiful girls – the true beauties – are rarely vain, arrogant, poseurs. It is the girl who makes disproportionate efforts with makeup, clothes, heels and hair who suffers these conceits. They are girls who have made themselves appear beautiful without ever reaching the exalted status of being beautiful girls.

What constitutes a beautiful girl? It is not merely an anatomical or aesthetic quality. Beautiful girls have an inner beauty, an inner light that defeats the darkness. It is a way of walking, smiling, of being. They have a certain smell, sweet as baby breath. They radiate good will, kindness, selflessness.

A beautiful woman is like a painting and remains beautiful no matter how old she is.

I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul.

All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

One passion leads to another. It's passion that makes the wheels of life turn, passion for work, passion for pleasure, passion for passion.

If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being.

Sex spelled backwards is excess and that's how it should always be.

Sex is a three letter word even the worst speller in the world can spell.

Sex exists in the now without past or future. If, for a single second, your minds drifts back to the past or forwards into the unknown, the moment withers like a dead plant and the passage of pleasure turns to a road of dust.

When you remove love from sex you enter a mansion with many rooms shaded in nuance and excess, an invitation to peel away all conventions and programming. A chance to explore your hidden self. You shed something and clothe yourself in something else. Sex is the greatest of gifts. Orgasm a glimpse of perfection.

After making love there is nothing like making love, slowly, idly, like walking without a destination, or swimming in a warm sea.

The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.

Destiny is desire meeting opportunity. You become who you are driven to be.

We make our own destiny, not because we can see the road ahead, but because we cannot see the road ahead. It is the road, the motion, the forward movement, that takes us to ourselves.

If you are open to change and welcome surprise, you know the secret of creativity and the secret of life.

You don't become a success by breaking the rules. You don't become a success by obeying the rules. You become a success by inventing the rules.

There was a monster in me that had to be fed by success. There is a monster in us all that has to be fed by something.

The future is trapped in a cage opened only by the key of genius.

Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.

Depression comes from not accepting the way things are - and seeing no way too change them.

It is in the nest of disappointment where depression lays its eggs.

Life is a long boring drive on an empty road punctuated by special moments that make the journey worth taking.

Little matters much and much doesn't matter at all.

When you cut the cords on the safety net and walk out on the highwire, you become yourself and become all that you can be and all that you were meant to be. But first, you must cut the cords.

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.

I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than I thought, and all those red lights inspired nothing more than a sense that I, too, should be fleeing somewhere.

Inside our mind there is hidden place that contains the mind within the mind. There, you will find another version of yourself that may be your true self. We do not find that self by travelling, by searching. We find that self by sitting still, being quiet and looking inside. Ask yourself: who am I? And your true self will answer.

When I was 6 I wanted to be a nurse. When I was 14 I wanted to be a spy or a lion tamer. When I was 16 I wanted too be a highwire walker or an acrobat. Or maybe a clown with a white face. Then I gave up wanting to be anything other than what I am and what I am is a woman with a woman's needs and a woman's desires.

Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.

There is a word I have always avoided in my writing, my life, my thoughts. That word is love. What does it mean? How do you deal with it? If you find it and lose it, how do you get over it? Love is something you feel and when you feel it you can’t trust it or define it. How can you sustain love for a long time? A short time? You may love your family, your friends. But you don’t invite them inside your body.

When you can cross the highwire without falling off, you are in a state of perfect balance, perfect grace. It is the same with obedience. When you submit, submit totally, you enter that same equilibrium, surrender and grace. This is the meaning of erotic.

We are trapped in a net of our our own self-doubt, on the programming force fed to us by parents, schools, society. In a certain light, on certain days, you can see that net. And once you can see it, you can learn to make it go away.

The seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action.

The problem with being a liar is you can never believe anyone else.

Love is like being on a small boat in the middle of the sea with no compass and no one to rely on except each other.

Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you chose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. We don't make choices so much as choices are made like a new fashion we slip into without realising.

Life is a juggling act with your own emotions. The trick is to always keep something in your hand and something in the air.

A woman's heart and a woman's dreams are malleable and can change at any moment. It is the essence of being a woman.

You can cross the Rubicon in a boat without getting wet, but surely, getting wet is the baptism before you begin that new life on the other side.

If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.

You may not believe in chance but it provides us with every opportunity we need.

When it happened I was terrified. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I was a cliche. I looked at myself in the mirror and in my eyes was a look I had never seen before: confusion, mystery and, yes, happiness. I had fallen in love.

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, a miracle, uniquely human. A kiss beneath the mistletoe. A kiss after midnight. A kiss before dying. The devil's kiss. As a picture tells a thousand words, so a kiss says everything that's important. I am told prostitutes never kiss their clients. It is too personal, too human. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss our hands and wave as loved ones begin a journey. We kiss strangers before dawn in the first hours of a New Year because our wintry lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss.

Two spacemen touching in anti-gravity is like a kiss. But then, there is nothing like a kiss. A kiss is a rare bird. The first sip of champagne. The fleeting glimpse of a shooting star. The kiss is uniquely human. We exchange bodily fluids with a kiss. A great kiss is like eating melon on a picnic. Like diving into a warm sea. A French kiss is a battle of tongues where everyone wins.

Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say ‘I love you’ a thousand ways but you can say it better with silence and a kiss.

It is at night when sleep like the outgoing sea leaves you dry and cold and the morning light arrives like a small punishment.

Nothing is better than sex and nothing is exactly like it.

Sex is about anticipation not culmination.

Sex is a three act play: foreplay, play and afterplay.

If sex is a journey, orgasm is the both the purpose and journey's end.

The touch of his fingertips on my back is like a great cellist brushing the strings of his instrument, or a watchmaker turning a tiny screw invisible to the naked eye. The feeling is erotic, magical, and I just want to go home and go to bed.

A picture may describe a 1000 words but it will often need 1000 words to describe a picture.

Just as you dress for the occasion you should undress when reading erotica.

When you've been everywhere, tried it all and done it all, what's left is the exploration of self, intellectually and sexually, through curiosity and erotica.

When you succumb to obedience, in an erotic sense, you are not giving away a part of yourself, but seeking something new, something other, within yourself.

The erotic is not about nudity and nudity is rarely erotic. The erotic is subtle, a feeling, a gesture, a mood, a story frozen in the moment that holds you breathless waiting for the next moment. Understand this, and you understand the erotic.

Beauty lies between the erotic and the tragic.

Love is possession, a sort of vanity.

There is a kind of truth in a well-told lie. When we look back, we don't see things as they were but how we would like them to have been.

The hardest thing in the world is to be original. It seems like our heads are filled with banalities and clichés. You have to keep digging deeper and deeper to try and find a fresh new seam that hasn't been explored.

If you roll a pearl around your mouth it slowly reveals the dreams of oysters, memories of the sea, the taste of orgasm.

Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.

Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous.

I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.

Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear.

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living.

He said: I don't like to read. And I said, honey, you haven't found the right girl.

Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.

A rubber doll with a microchip can imitate human flesh without human feeling. Porn leaves an emptiness inside. Erotica sets up a vibration in the mind that sends pulsing waves through the body.

It's fun being a girl.

Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.

Happiness is a drug. It creates a biological change in the brain cells that inhibits negative feelings. Happiness boosts energy and increases energy in others.

Life is not a test or a competition. We only compete with ourselves.

Jealousy is only hurt ego. Revenge is meaningless. Life is abstract. There is no point other than pleasure.

You must write as if each word is a precious drop of blood, or a tear to be saved in a glass phial.

Every time you have an orgasm an angel comes to life..

The moment of orgasm is like the first dramatic moment of birth when you draw breath and scream out that you are alive. It is hard to imagine the moment when you fade back into the vacuum and draw your last breath.

Perfection is not something you strive for. Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder. Perfection is a state of grace, of peace of serenity, a moment as fleeting as a smile.

In life there are perfect moments. You cannot plan them - the very act interferes with the laws of the universe - but you must be ready to recognise them when they come.

There is a moment when time stops, when the air grows still, when you enter a state of nothingness, a state of purity and perfection. That is the moment to strive for.

Relationships are nine parts intuition, one part madness.

Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.

Love and being in love are not the same. A woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.

Sometimes love is pastel. Sometimes love is black. And sometimes love is fiery red and you feel as if you are going to burn in the flames.

I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail.

Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century – at 21 the world surely has come of age – is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals.

While love lasts it should be relished, gobbled up like ice cream, explored as the conquistadors explored the unknown continent. But when love evaporates, when love hurts, we must learn to let go of the idea that love is forever.

Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.

Love enters us like a vague ailment. Your head spins. Your underarms tingle. Love hurts and love has consequences: marriage, babies, separation, longing, human complications.

Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.

What is love? Imagine a helium balloon tied down and then you cut the ropes on a windy day. That is love.

I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn't sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile.

I had avoided writing about love. I had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine - the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen.

Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.

Is this love? The light looks different. Actually the shade looks different. I feel different. Everything is just so different I don't know where to begin...

I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.

When it happens it happens instantly. It's like diving into a pool of warm silky water, like flying through the air on invisible wings, like shedding an old skin and growing a new one. When you fall in love the spirals of your DNA unwind and rewind in the opposite direction. What was black becomes white.

The way the leaves on the trees tremble in the passing air is the way love reaches you, from all directions at once, mysterious, overwhelming, indescribable. To be in love is to find something you didn't know was missing.

I was always in love with love and now I am in love. In love, everything looks different. Everything tastes different. It is as if you have been reborn, transformed, become another person whom you don't completely recognise.

The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town at night. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress and tears wet my cheeks. Then I dried my eyes, I looked in the mirror, and I said these two words. Never again.

In our own way, in your own way, we are all of us a masterpiece. Everyone is unique.

We are flowers in the field seeking our individuality. We may seem similar but we are all unique, without exception. Everyone is special.

If life is what you make it, the building blocks are your desire and your passion.

Innocence isn't something we lose, but realise we don't need.

From a book you can learn the theory but it takes practise to learn how to live life.

To listen to criticism and act on it if it is valid and ignore it if it is not is a sign of intelligence.

I had come to the conclusion that everyone took sex far too seriously. I mean, it's only sex.

The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.

When you dance, your whole body dances, your skin and bones, your soul, The tips of your fingers and the roots of your hair. When you stop dancing you stop living.

Italians make you laugh and break your heart.

Never give up.' This is not sound advice, it is bad advice. You must give up when there is no point in continuing. Then begin a new course. There is no greater failure than not changing course when the time is right to do so.

Photographs shape the past in our own image.

To be or not to be what exactly?

Mummy became a shadow, a woman who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going to be the wrong thing, that you find yourself by stepping out of yourself.

You don't feel yourself falling in love, like it's a journey, a process; on the contrary, it hits you like a sudden ague, a fever, the realisation that your life will never be the same again.

Always say yes and try before you say no.

An attractive woman becomes beautiful when she's happy and in love.

Falling in love is like falling from a high cliff into a warm silky sea, the falling is like flying and the landing is like a glimpse of the divine.

You wait and wait, you get used to waiting. But when your time comes, you must not miss it.

Love is the colour of spring sunshine muted through old windows. Love has a taste, a texture - dark chocolate with pistachios; a sound - wind chimes echoing from a distant hill; a rhythm - the tango, obviously.

Happiness is achieving your goals. Contentment is not having any.

Good writing like good sex requires discipline.

There is only one secret to great writing and that's great writing.

Girls love kissing. Our lips replicate the lips we discreetly hide. We redden lips to show the health and allure of our labia, the welcoming of your tongue in our mouth a foretaste of lips moistened and blood-gorged by desire. Some kisses last forever in our minds, some kisses are best forgotten. Every kiss is unique and kissing lips is uniquely human.

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, uniquely human. A kiss before midnight. A kiss before dying. The Judas kiss. The kiss of the devil. A big wet smacker beneath the mistletoe. More can be said with a kiss than a book full of words. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of the conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss babies' cheeks to soak up their innocence. We kiss the foreheads of loved ones as they begin a journey. We kiss beautiful strangers in far away places because on hot July nights with the music of the sea and the stars above your head your lips are incomplete until they are joined in a kiss.

A really good kiss is like a secret you want to share. A really good kiss reminds you why it’s hard to decide on the right lipstick. The first kiss stays in you’re mind – forever. Time expands with a really good kiss and you add another few seconds to the end of your life.

They say the best things in life are free, and they are if you can afford them.

We are drawn to repetition. We can watch the tide rolling for hours into shore. The clouds skittering across the sky. We can listen to the pulsing beat of bongo drums and are drawn magnetically to the slap, slap, slap of a girl being chastised. The human is a mystery, even too himself.

Don't waste time with people who waste time. Time is precious, fragile as a butterfly wing, meaningful as an orgasm.

Reading - like masturbation - is something you do alone and very little in life brings more pleasure.

You enter a book as if you are setting out on a journey and, if it is a good book, you will be a different person when you reach the end.

The secret is confusion, make it, create it, live it, be it.

I'm my characters' galley slave.

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.