The only ones who ever went to a Tory conference with good intentions were the IRA.

I was seven years old when The Exorcist came out. I remember the grown-ups talking about it. I remember one grown-up saying she had to sleep with the light on for months after seeing it. I remember another saying he had to go on pills for his nerves after he saw it.

When I swore at my father and he brandished his big belt, he thought he was beating all the contempt and all the defiance out of me. He only beat it farther in. They told me they were going to have me put in a home, but I didn’t know what a home was and I wasn’t afraid. They invented new cruelties, and I invented new worlds their cruelties couldn’t reach.

Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing.

There were rat footprints in the dried lard in the frying pan. Sometimes the rats woke me, but this time I had slept through their visit. They were now a fact of life, like dogs or pigeons.It was Raeberry Street, Maryhill, Glasgow in 1975. The cleansing department was on strike, and mountains of plastic bags full of garbage were piled in the back courts of the crumbling tenements. The flats didn’t have bathrooms or hot water, just closet-sized toilets.

Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.

When we attach to a problem, we make the problem worse. When we attach to a solution, we make the problem worse.

Spasm couldn’t get laid if you sent him to a brothel with a blank cheque. He had his Lou Reed and his Bob Hope, but never his Nat King Cole.

Sometimes Mike would fuck her and I’d watch. They didn’t go to bed; they didn’t even take their clothes off. Mike would just stick it into her, stick it in at the crook of her elbow, and tease her till she moaned. Then he’d press the plunger and her whole body would shudder in a junk orgasm.

Then his eye was in my mouth, a string of bloody nerves dangling from my lips. I couldn’t believe how easily it came out. Even the feel and taste of it wouldn’t have convinced me if I hadn’t been looking straight into his fountaining red socket as I listened to him scream.