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

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?

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

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.

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

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.