“I left London to migrate to Manchester because at that time it was -- if you had a personality disorder and a good record collection -- the most interesting place to be in the world.”

“There followed three years in which I became a semi-respectable commuter, rising with everybody else and frequently being stranded on a Central Line train with revolting strangers due to signalling problems. It was difficult because doing anything en masse just goes against my nature.”

“The New York Dolls were toweringly influential. They were way ahead of their time, although always reliably late at the hairdressers.”

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.”

“One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable—embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?”

“As soon as I left your place, I miss you.”

“London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”