“Yardy doing a good job out there—1-14 off his five overs so far—but Bangla are letting this drift. The bowling is there to attack, but they're as passive as sleeping sloths at the mo.”

“You don't understand the things I do, but I do have my reasons. They're not your reasons, so they're not real to you, but they're real to me, and that's enough.”

“Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook."But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life.”

“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”

“I'll take my clothes off - whatever the job requires.”

“They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.”

“Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.”