I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.