My God...it can think.

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast.

It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe.

That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.

I took to the Bodleian Library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.