It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.

There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.