We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

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

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.