There was a papery film like mothskin stretched over his eyes. He slithered about making goldfish gasps as though traumatised by an otherworld invisible but to his eyes. He wore a corduroy suit in a marmalade shade. He was a cattish sort and slow-gesturing.

There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness.

He stops up – he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.

It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths.

The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones.

Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere – it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung, for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for the ripe language-it means your words may be about to go off?

The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths.

He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.

He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city.

My husband is like one of those second-hand books you buy that’s got all the wrong bits underlined.