What?’ he said. I’m sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he’s got in the habit of saying ‘what?’ automatically to every conversational gambit – I notice myself doing it sometimes.

J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour.

He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn’t always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet.

How long does a recession have to last before it’s called a depression?

I wondered whether, if Kierkegaard had been a Catholic, they would have made him a saint by now, and built a basilica over his grave. He would make a good patron saint of neurotics.

Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.

Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for – desire undiluted by habit.

I’m a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It’s kind of exciting – the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other’s company before outside of a dictionary.