I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.