Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

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.

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.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.