If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.