We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else.

Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times- even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it.

Lou Reed is unimpressed by applause, and lives a life detached from custom. His stare is cold and his romanticism is brutal. His songs are half-sung melodies of menace. He might drop dead any second, and is therefore the real thing. Examined ravenously like a museum exhibit, Lou Reed is evidently spiked to excess, and strangely loveable.

I see the world, it makes me puke, But then I look at you and know, that somewhere there’s a someone who can soothe me.

The Smiths is right there, insubordinates of an accidental moment in days when there is no sign anywhere of independent artists or a disconnected view.

I am very serious about my baby.

The rhino is now more or less extinct, and it’s not because of global warming or shrinking habitats. It’s because of Beyonce’s handbags.

But that’s life. Go first and be sure of a hard time.

I’d rather be remembered as a big-mouthed failure than an effete little wimp.