Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.