“I was gazing back in the direction of Wales, watching the Prudence clone, when I noticed a couple of drunks lurching in my direction. Night people who live in service stations. The insufficiently deceased.”

“...drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.”

“Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.”

“Why not add another yarn? That’s all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.”

“The poet he was escorting into Wales was a Horus-headed dud of some personal magnetism. The hair was feathered gell, the nose hooked. He stared at me and he didn’t. His eyes belonged to a magician; one bored into you, right through the lens into the depths of the vitreous humor—while the other popped and wobbled in the style of Ben Turpin. He folded in on himself, profile sharp as an axe. A labrys. This man would have no problem seeing around a corner.”

“I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn’t do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes.”

“One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he’d stop dead in his tracks.”