“The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.”

“You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.”

“I will wait for you until the gold from the sun dwindles away.”

“Gold is the corpse of value...”

“Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”

“I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.”

“Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink - all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink.”

“I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge b...”