I'm a great dog fanatic. My own dog died a little while ago and I take it very personally when things die-it's a major offence.

Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.

In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

How many human eyes...had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?