“We too often laughed at the same time to be a whore and a lonely guy.”

“...Simon and I by then were practicing to be apart, rehearsing together in the same room and often in the same conversation.”

“What is it about men that make women so lonely?”

“I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.”

“Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.”

“The peculiar striations that define someone's personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.”

“The reason his father has no time for poetry is that he is afraid of the messiness of life. Poetry feeds on all that spills over the boundaries of the usual things, the everyday things with which most people are obsessed, so William has no time for it.”