The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.