Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.

My father was all brain and little heart.

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

The most natural way you would attempt to cope with something inside you that is affecting your moods and your energy levels is to intervene with chemicals to help and because medical science hasn't come up with pharmaceuticals that do particularly well you tend to reach for the chemicals that are outside the Pharma counter, i.e. narcotics and alcohol because they can guarantee your mood more or less.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.