Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it’s...

Obscenity is a function of culture – a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.

…nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots:...

An hour would be enough. An hour with my head on the pillow beside yours, foreheads touching, eyes locked with eyes (just the two of us, mind you, minus that sodding cat); an hour to...

Even the biggest blaze, though, has to start somewhere, with a tiny spark, or arsonists would be out of business.

Shape? Does a fog have shape? Does the twilight? Does the onset of darkness?

Where is the pain when your pride is wounded? And why do we say that: wounded? There is no gash, no blood, not even a scratch. Which part of us hurts? The brain cells? The...

Sabine used to maintain that preparation for a dance is comparable to what goes on in the back room of a butcher’s shop: the meat for consumption is sliced and dressed and put in nice...

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person’s welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something...

Serena had to cross her legs: in moments of dire amusement her bladder tended to play tricks.

I say sister because we were never too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts,...

All eyes turned to look at us’ would be a slipshod way of putting it; eyes don’t turn anyway, heads do, but as our little group joined the fringe of the assembly, there was a...

Love is that as well, I was forgetting: it is taking a huge gamble, staking your all on a single improbable throw, jumping off a cliff and trusting an unknown person to catch you before...

Enemy number one was now the disease. It had a presence as solid as that of a person – I think all serious illnesses do.

Years later I saw a film – poignantly sad, and for me unbearably so – about a scientist who had invented a kind of total sense recorder, not just video but audio and smellio and...

What’s that she’s fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it’s a pair of tweezers. She’s plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her arms, of all places. Not even legs...

…music, music, records, records, noise to cover silence.