“Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.”

“As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.”

“If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.”

“The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the fla...”

“Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.”

“My mind feels like a beehive without the buzz.”

“Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?”

“So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most pas...”

“Charity liked brandy. She liked the way it burned her throat while soothing the ache in her heart.”

“I am tough for a reason and it is to fucking destroy the music. I dance hard.”

“Hed reached that perilous stage of being drunk enough to think himself a good dancer but was dangerously close in tipping over to the point where hed act like an arse”

“The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.”