I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.