All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I am the worst judge of my books.

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

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

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.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.