“I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester”

“You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.”

“I don’t want you to see me. I want you to know me. I want you to love me with the rest of your senses.”

“If we leave that general descriptive talk where everything which looks like a poem can be called a poem and turn instead to normative talk, we will of course not recognize as a poem everything that looks like a poem. A real poem has to be a successful poem, a successful speech act. In approximately the same way that only a mathematical proof which really proves something can be called a mathematical proof. It is not enough that it looks like a proof. The proof has to prove. For the poem it is not enough to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.”

“She liked it? 'I love it--the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot.”

“Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around — a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.”

“The only reason why world war 2 happened was because Chuck Norris decided to take a nap.”