It is frightening to feel that all your happiness is bound up to another person. That without them you don’t – you don’t particularly want to live’.

The search for identity in one’s youth is a journey of alternate boredom and agony interrupted by flash of joy.

But with Freddy I seemed to have the best sort of conversations, where our talk became exploratory and would lead on to new ideas, like thinking aloud, and in the process of clarifying improvisatory theories I always made useful discoveries about what I thought and felt.

It does not matter how sternly you tell yourself that the crippling paranoia of the small hours of the night is due solely to body chemistry. You still feel absolutely miserable.

It’s hard to say why with some people you could talk all day and all night, while with others it’s a struggle to find enough to say during a single course at dinner.

Cordelia glared at me. ‘I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you’d be correcting his grammar’.

Mark Anthony had established ascendance the day before by springing claws like flick knives and hissing like a maddened cobra. Dirk had rolled on his back and ratified the peace treaty before the ink was dry, like a dog of sense.

Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration.

You may as well attempt to colonise the moon with white mice as publish a volume of poetry'.

I think there is nothing more completely beautiful and more beautifully complete than walls lined with well-arranged books.