"Now, […] the world is beginning to look like what it is—overcrowded, dirty, noisy, smelly, and rapidly running out of resources. We're nearing the end of the rainbow, with not a crock of gold in sight."

"Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?""

"I turn over a new leaf every day," I said. "But the blots show through."

"Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia."

"England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons."

"I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg."

"As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems."

"Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place."

"‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.’"

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out."

"Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace."

"How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever."

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom."

"Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."

"Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember."

"I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger."

"On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers!"

"I suppose when there's no more room for another crow's-foot, one attains a sort of peace?"

"He had something of the air, if one can imagine such a combination, of a witty and decadent Red Indian."

"Princess: I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I could wish. Adrian: No? Princess: They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."

"It is the peculiar temper of Firbank's humour which divides him from the nineties. His raw material, allowing for the inevitable changes of fashion, is almost identical with Oscar Wilde's – the lives of rich, slightly decadent people seen against a background of traditional culture, grand opera, the picture galleries and the Court; but Wilde's was at heart radically sentimental. His wit is ornamental; Firbank's is structural. Wilde is rococo; Firbank is baroque."

"Oh! help me, heaven," she prayed, "to be decorative and to do right!"

"The world is so disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."

"There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly."

"Awful things!... truly awful. The floor in our dressing room starts to run with blood... disembodied hands come out of the wall and crawl across the stage."

"Hell is not a place, it's a state of mind and body; hell is obsession with a voice, a face, a name."

"Happiness is like the first blissful intoxication of morphine. It doesn't last very long."

"Up in box five I blinked in surprised amusement. That was a new one! Little Giry should be writing Gothic novels, not prancing around the stage dressed as a water nymph!"

"Ah, well... hell is full of burning boats, did you know that, Nadir? I daresay that's what makes it so bloody hot."

"My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain... For as long as I love, no woman will ever look on me in love."

"Killing is like riding, you see, one never really loses the knack."

"The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. The corps de ballet were already calling me "the Phantom of the Opera," an intriguing sobriquet which appealed to me very strongly, until I realized that it would mean signing my ransom notes P.T.O. One did not wish to descend to the ridiculous! O.G. I became and O.G. I have remained. But I still liked to think of myself as the Phantom."

"I have often thought I would have been quite happy as a spider. Even a spider has the right to a mate."

"Death was the ultimate power and I his eager, willing apprentice."

"Memories are like fireflies darting across the surface of my mind, showing me here and there images so sharp and vivid that I catch my breath in wonder before the vignette disappears, sinking like a pebble into the quicksand of regret and recrimination."

"I can make anything disappear, if I really want to."

"Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him... Flower and bird, two species never meant to mate. Yet at length the rose overcame her fear and from that single, forbidden union was born the red rose that Allah never intended the world to know."

"For a moment I thought I knew exactly how Christ must have felt as He called John."

"He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror."

"He was a confidence-man, pauper, tutor, blackmailer, paedophile, translator – and author of seven novels and a number of short stories. Rolfe was a trickster whose failed life stank to himself as to the few friends whom he had and betrayed. But he was a fascinating figure: a bore, but also a pseudo-Borgian freak whose vindictiveness and paranoia have deservedly become legendary."

"Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties – French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time."

"He took the imperial hand and shook it in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English fashion."

"He seems to have been a serpent of serpents in the bosom of all the nineties. That in itself endears him to one."