“What's that she's fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it's a pair of tweezers. She's plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her arms, of all places. Not even legs or face, whic...”

“Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of ...”

“Love is that as well, I was forgetting: it is taking a huge gamble, staking your all on a single improbable throw, jumping off a cliff and trusting an unknown person to catch you before you hit the...”

“Years later I saw a film - poignantly sad, and for me unbearably so - about a scientist who had invented a kind of total sense recorder, not just video but audio and smellio and touchio and the res...”

“Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.”

“An hour would be enough. An hour with my head on the pillow beside yours, foreheads touching, eyes locked with eyes (just the two of us, mind you, minus that sodding cat); an hour to smell the smel...”

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves”

“Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.”

“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”