It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.