They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

I desire therefore I exist.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.