My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

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

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?