“Cat, you asked me before to find out if those dream -suppression pills had any side effects. I’ve checked with Pathology, and they said you might experience depression, mood swings, irritability, paranoia, and chronic fatigue. Have you noticed any of that?”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”

“I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”

“There's nothing to took forward to any more if you don't have dreams," he said. "Because dreams are goals and John might have run out of goals. So he died.”

“Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It’s got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I’ve had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.”

“Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.”