'Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking; old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair, smoking; die-hard holding urine sack, blood sack, smoking.'
'I watched as she stuffed three oil paintings packed in bubble wrap into her large duffel bag, along with twenty t-shirts. We were only going for three days.'
'I can’t help feeling like he’s dismantled the very admirable legacy of his earlier work by his later, overly prolific efforts. It’s a more benign version of Ralph Nader.'
'Last Halloween, a woman was thrown out of a fourth-floor window in Marylebone. I was heading back to my flat on Chiltern Street with the intention of watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film that I had always avoided.'
'It is a secret, private, hidden world that operates under a strict set of unspoken internal laws: never screw a partner and once a deal is done it is a 'mazen brucha' and it must be adhered to.'
A document from another time: Robin Yassin-Kassab's diary of his 2008 return journey to Syria, and a Damascus hazed by diesel fumes but still standing.
'Only his handwriting seemed to locate him exactly, to ground his body in the act of writing and thinking and breathing; each stroke of the pen a black ink tether that tied me to him and him to me.'
'Inspired by his loathing of the hypocrites and knaves who surrounded him, Rochester aimed to show his friends (and enemies) that he was a serious and considered thinker.'
I ignored her pain. This was not difficult to do; her pain was rarely justified. To wear special seamless socks was to stick her feet in an iron smelter. To wear a soft acrylic scarf was to be garroted by a scroll of razor wire.
When I left for Paris at the age of nineteen, you were still a stranger to me. Come to think of it, I never called you Mama; I called you Mother, just as I never called my father Papa. How did that come about?