I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.

You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.