The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

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

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?