Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.

Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.