“In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.”

“He wakes! The steel giant wakes! Long, long ago he rose from the sea, with the blood of life streaming from his belly. And then they buried him with thunder...and...carrots...at Stonehenge. But now he wakes again. The Age of Rotten Fish is over; the Age of Steel and Bombs is upon us. And he had come to give us life and strength, to free us form these cells, to restore us once again to baseball and ping pong! Sent by God from the Great Beyond!!!”

“He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.”

“TV sounds are all the same; there's no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.”

“The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol.”

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”

“They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.”