When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

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.

There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)