“I accidentally brought my graphing calculator camping.”

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.”

“Ever met a sympathetic doctor? No ways. They’re always impatient, glancing at the watch, calculating the price of your sickness against the price of another pair of shoes for the bitch wife with the reluctant cunt.”

“The man nodded and brought a bottle from the glass-fronted fridge,”

“I lay in my bed for I don't know how long doing my best to work things out, and my best certainly wasn't good enough.”

“These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.”

“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”