“My own boyfriend didn't think I had the hypothetical balls to have sex in the park or go to a drag ball in the eighteen hundreds. Was I that much of a wimp?”

“To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.”

“Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good.”

“This book could scare them. The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm - I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it”

“I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.”

“I think holidays create so much pressure because people feel they should be having a good time. But you shouldn't. ”

“Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?”