'A few years back I was flying out to California, reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I found the book was doing weird things to my mind and body. Suddenly, up there over the Midwest, I felt agitated and flinchy.'
'We communicated through letters. And through a form of communication that I thought of as a Dave speciality, the phone message left on the office answering machine hours after everyone had departed.'
'Dave explored that huge luxury ship, inspecting its many restaurants and gaming rooms and lounges, all twelve decks and 1,374 passengers, their acres of horrifying flesh soon frying in the sun.'
'At twenty-four when our paths crossed, he was painfully deferential, totally unworldly, woefully underdressed, but you knew that he possessed a formidable, even staggering talent and intellect.'
'In order to write, David couldn’t be in the public eye and still function. It was simply too hard for him. David didn’t have the armour most of us develop to survive in the world.'
'David loved being a writer, not so that he could dazzle us with the glorious arias of his intellect, but so that he could take us with him as he questioned what most of us don’t bother to question.'
Layoffs. There’s something good about them. You get to know people. You go out, say, on the balcony for a smoke and someone says: Hey, you’ve heard the news? They sacked Lycos.
'Athenians, in the main, are taut and deep brown and much taller than I imagined. From the shade in the cafe, I can get a good look at them down at the shore.'
It was the trickle of royalties from an inexplicably popular Japanese translation of my first novel which had provided me with my living for the previous few years.
'I too was drinking, having helped myself to a bottle of white from the complimentary drinks table. I’d placed this bottle on the Current Affairs shelving to the right of my seat.'