Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.