And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.