Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.

Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.

I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.

Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

...with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.

Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably.

Who let the dogs in? ...This, we fear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.

Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.

Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw.

As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.

I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.

After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.