“During our session, I told Tove about how I'd done mind-speak on Duncan, but it only worked when I was irritated. Using that logic,Tove spent most of the morning trying to irritate me into using it. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time I just got pointlessly annoyed.”

“Ready?" Tove asked without looking at me. He started walking before I answered."Duncan, you don't need to come with us," I told him as I hurried after Tove. Duncan followed me the way he always did, but he slowed."It's probably best if he does," Tove said, tucking his hair behind his ears."Why?" I asked, but Duncan smiled, excited to be included."We need someone to test on," Tove replied matter-of-factly, and Duncan's smile instantly faded.”

“It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind.”

“Nothing more then nothing can be said.We make our lives by what we love.Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: “I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others”. Satie said: “When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing”.Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.”

“The most irritating thing about cliches, I decided, was how frequently they were true.”

“I'd actually spent some time in my bedroom moving around using only one leg,trying to raise my sympathy level when I got really frustrated with him.”