"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Sex is about anticipation not culmination."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Good writing like good sex requires discipline."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Italians make you laugh and break your heart."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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