He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.