"You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it."
"I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans."
"You love life because life's all there is."
"You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room."
"The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it."
"Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere."
"By all means, become an abomination--but only while unhinged by grief or wrath."
"All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation."
"I've always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It's hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt like it you'd learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can't blame women."
"There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore."
"I read somewhere that when you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness."
"There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems."