“Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.”

“If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.”

“I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.”

“And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.”

“I think I'm losing my bottle. I think I'm going tonto.”

“Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping center, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. — The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it’s generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock.”

“Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right – it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from.”