...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.