You don't look so hot, Adrien." "Yeah, well I'm having a bad heart day." His upper lip curled in a semblance of a smile. "Tell me about it.

Like true philosophers I've come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.

People loved you in the way they knew how - and often it was not the way you knew. Or needed.

He needed fresh air and sunshine. A walk in the woods and afterward a good book to read by the fire. Yeah, that was the life.

Cops before breakfast.Before coffee even. As if Mondays weren't bad enough.

If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity

Rachel delivered it like an official pronouncement. Like she was one of the fairies gifting Sleeping Beauty's christening: Beauty. Intelligence. Heterosexual.

To find them all in one package...well, perhaps better not to dwell on his package in my fragile state.

I thought of the words of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.

I don't know if real courage lies in storming barricades or simply not denying the truth.

gravity, n. I imagine you saved my life. And then I wonder if I'm just imagining it.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story and all kinds of sonic goodness.

Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

When you're given a song, it's my job to record the lyrics, story and emotion, and make everyone who is listening to the song believe that it was my words and experience.

Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.

It's enough just to speak when spoken to, to give some minimal reaction to a stimulus. But to actually be the stimulus doesn't even occur to me.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards.

In absolute terms, I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide.