“Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.”

“Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.”

“I gestured at my litre of fizzy red wine. “Want a drop of this?” I asked him.No thanks. I try not to drink at lunchtime.”So do I. But I never quite make it.”I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime.”Me too. But I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don’t.”Yes, well it all comes down to choices, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s the same in the evenings. Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It’s the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both.”Isn’t it a tragedy?”

“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.”

“It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.”

“Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?”

“Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.”