“The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up till then. I'd been so far away but I knew I was home.”

“Being famous is like a little bit of you is taken away and goes off and lives on its own and does what it wants... I wish it would do more interesting things!”

“It was in these sessions that I first came across the "To my shame" technique...You can get away with any admission, however appalling, so long as it's preceded by the words "to my shame."...The self-accusatory prefix robs the listener of the right to disapprove...SANS "TO MY SHAME."I used to exploit women because I couldn't cope with being alone...CORRECT RESPONSE. He didn't say "to my shame!" You bastard! You viscious selfish bastard. It's like "Simon Says" for junkies.”

“My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.”

“Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.”

“I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.”

“To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.”