He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.

Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.

Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad".

I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.

Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.