The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and...

No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.

The next day I had a hangover.I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than...

…humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.

It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that...

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these “normal” human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? ‘Course not. It’s just the same. We’re middle-class and we’re British. Repression...

Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent....

If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalizing and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion.

Be proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition,...

It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.

And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love....

He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the...

If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

Pretty much.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real...

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body,...

Are you one of my students?’She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.

This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely...

Blood doesn’t satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics...

…human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism…inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)….And through it all there has always...

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you...

I couldn’t believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.