For the Tintin books were my emotional universe. To read them felt quite simply like being loved: in advance and by an entire world of pure possibility, my future. But to write to the author was to reach out for the lover. Even today, the power of reading one remains visceral: each book acts as a form of transportation, not just to the emotional landscape of this first literary love affair but to very specific memories.

I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything.

Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't.

Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.

Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.