I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.