We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last – as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that’s intimate. I love books where you feel you’re having a romance with the writer.

Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy.

After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs.

I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness... A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.

I’m completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That’s the way I do it, anyway.

It won’t be long before we’ll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

If what you want to do is write, then it’s madness not to do it.