And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal...

Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people...

To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to...Well, to be honest, I'm...

With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever...

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never...

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.

No, I want to take you out back and beat your fucking head on the floor.

The more I heard, the less I knew.

The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust.

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever...

And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

If only I could have my time again.

I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.

I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.

But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

Grief is a peculiar emotion.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny...