“I saw a white toilet, with no plumbing, alone in a field of snow. Well, almost alone. There were two naked albinos and a polar bear sitting on it, and I felt inspired to write a love poem.”

“Go with polar bears, I say to myself. Polar bears at the North Pole. Baby polar bears scooting along after their mothers in the snow. Polar bears drinking Coca-Cola.”

“That’s nothing. To impress a polar bear I met in Switzerland, I once got on two tiny sticks and flew down a snow-covered mountain.”

“Over your breasts of motionless current,over your legs of firmness and water,over the permanence and the prideof your naked hairI want to be, my love, now that the tears arethrowninto the raucous baskets where they accumulate,I want to be, my love, alone with a syllableof mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.”

“Then I have an ivory chair high to sit upon, Almost like my father's chair, which is an ivory throne; There I sit uplift and upright, there I sit alone.”

“Moreover, I was beginning to experience something new - the fear of being alone. I had not been alone since I walked from the hospital along Piccadilly, and then there had been bewildering novelty in all I saw. Now,for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is by nature gregarious. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled...”