It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored.

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.

Living with bipolar, schizophrenia or any other mental condition takes a recognition that one has a chronic condition that needs managing. The management can be through pharmaceutical intervention, talk therapy, mindfulness programmes, diet and exercise changes, all kinds of things.