“Take the stupidest thing you've ever done. At least it's done. It's over. It's gone. We can all learn from our mistakes and heal and move on. But it's harder to learn or heal or move on from something that hasn't happened; something we don't know and is therefore indefinable; something which could very easily have been the best thing in our lives, if only we'd taken the plunge, if only we'd held our breath and stood up and done it, if only we'd said yes.”

“Probably some of the best things that have ever happened to you in life, happened because you said yes to something. Otherwise things just sort of stay the same.”

“I love London. I love everything about it. I love its palaces and its museums and its galleries, sure. But also, I love its filth, and damp, and stink. Okay, well, I don’t mean love, exactly. But I don’t mind it. Not any more. Not now I’m used to it. You don’t mind anything once you’re used to it. Not the graffiti you find on your door the week after you painted over it, or the chicken bones and cider cans you have to move before you can sit down for your damp and muddy picnic. Not the everchanging fast food joints – AbraKebabra to Pizza the Action to Really Fried Chicken – and all on a high street that despite its three new names a week never seems to look any different. Its tawdriness can be comforting, its wilfulness inspiring. It’s the London I see every day. I mean, tourists: they see the Dorchester. They see Harrods, and they see men in bearskins and Carnaby Street. They very rarely see the Happy Shopper on the Mile End Road, or a drab Peckham disco. They head for Buckingham Palace, and see waving above it the red, white and blue, while the rest of us order dansak from the Tandoori Palace, and see Simply Red, White Lightning, and Duncan from Blue. But we should be proud of that, too. Or, at least, get used to it.”

“If we were given one word of information in our entire history, how we'd treasure it! how we'd pore over ever syllable, divining it's meaning, arguing its importance; how we'd examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet...we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day we'll die of voluntary ignorance ”

“We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us--words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.”

“...maybe sometimes it's riskier not to take a risk. Sometimes all you're guaranteeing is that things will stay the same.”

“I’m not one of those guys who can hear a band and immediately cite their influences and probable heroes. There are guys like that out there. Play them the first drumbeat and they’ll start banging on about Led Zeppelin or Limp Bizkit or how everything can be traced back to the man who wrote the Birdie Song. Dev can do it with videogames. He can take one look at a game and tell you what it’s trying to be, where it got the idea, what it’s been crossed with and how well it’s done, but I just can’t. Because I’m the other sort of person. A Type 2. One that judges everything on its own merits. Not because it’s the right and just and fair thing to do, but because there’s something about me that doesn’t quite have that passion. That need for peripheral knowledge. I like a little of everything; I don’t need it all. It can make conversations with the Type 1s a little strained. A Type 1 will have all his opinions ready to go and probably alphabetised before he even gets near you. A Type 2 will then shrink behind his sandwich.”