"There were occasions when I looked at Eleanor and felt such love – her face and entire being seemed luminous – that I couldn’t bear the strength of it and had to turn away. I didn’t want to feel this deeply: the disturbance, the possession. Sex I loved; like drugs, it was play, headiness. I’d grown up with kids who taught me that sex was disgusting. It was smells, smut, embarrassment and horse laughs. But love was too powerful for me. Love swam right into the body, into the valves, muscles and bloodstream, while sex, the prick, was always outside. I did want then, in a part of myself, to dirty the love I felt, or, somehow, to extract it from the body."

The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi