That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

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

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.