She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped.

When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate.

Not one word of the following is true

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.