“I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.”

“There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation -- the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living.”

“I used to believe everything I read, but now I'm steppin' out.”

“In my experience, a lot of the boys who are real computer-heads tend to be pale-skinned sci-fi fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I happen to be a pale-skinned sci-fi fan myself—but that doesn’t mean I have to fancy other seethrough geeks.So let’s hope Adam isn’t as picky as me.”

“If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.”

“The second god lived by mountains that flowedBy the blue shiny lit roadsHad forgot what others still tried to grasp”

“Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who didn't think enough of themselves to make something of themselves- people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.”