The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.

I was cured all right.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

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