Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that...but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.