“It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fiftee...”

“This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.”

“The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, thats the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and here...”

“Normally, words are sentfrom the brain towards the mouth, and somewhere along the line you take a moment to checkthem, see that they are actually the ones you ordered and that theyre nicely wrapped...”

“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only ...”

“I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I dont know why theyd decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, s...”

“Some people think football [soccer] is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

“Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”

“Every one belongs to every one else.”

“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy”

“The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. Th...”