You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.

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

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.

My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.