And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are.

So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

She had stuff to give, but it was ungiven; it was locked away.

That was part of being human, I discovered. It was about knowing which lies to tell, and when to tell them. To love someone is to lie to them.

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes. 39. No one is ever completely

Names are a symptom of a species which values the individual self above the collective good.’

Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.

The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically.