“How was the light today?”“Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.”

“Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script?”

“We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.”

“Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.”

“Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows...”

“The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.”

“For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do...[Lucifer]”

“Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.”

“It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.”

“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”

“If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you’d be miserable poor.”