“The mind-blowing, ridiculous sex which was the stuff of both poetry and porn - so unlike anything else I had ever experienced before.”

“The old world had been consumed with the search for More Stuff. Now there was more stuff than anyone could ever use, and little or none of anything else.”

“We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.”

“It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.”

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”

“It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination. I was assailed by a sensation of desolation more intense than anything I had previously known, as if I had been abandoned at dusk in an autumnal wasteland where no answering sound would ever come, however often I called. Is that, I wonder, what is meant by the pat phrase "disappointed love"?”