I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Never let haters 'still' your flow. They can only do so with your permission.

Two wrongs never add up to a right. But it's okay, I always sucked at maths.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

As the Tories know, the problem with setting yourself up as a shining example for others to follow is that when you get caught out, that proverbial substance really hits the fan.

We can look at history and see that [political turmoil is] fertile ground for art.

Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.