"More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester. I'd become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me."

"What a bloody jungle income tax is! It's a wonder we don't all go on strike and refuse to pay."

"But magic can't operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees."

"True doppelgängers should never meet face-to-face, you know."

"Redemption's just a word and as I'm not a Christian it means nothing to me."

"Distrust grows out of lies. Wrong-doing grows out of distrust. Tragedy grows out of wrong-doing. But out of honesty grows love and love's so powerful, it'll be like a suit of armour, protecting Robert, protecting you."

"'... we have to be kind, we have to be charitable and we can't condemn people just because they get in a mess...even the best people can get into ghastly messes,...we must never judge other people too harshly because although they can make awful mistakes they can still be very nice people.'"

"“You’re just doing that to pass the time,” said Davide, dismissively. “Just to pass the time,” agreed Jac. “Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.”"

"'I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.'"

"My first thesis is that identity is unitary."

"A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force."

"Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts."

"They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another."

"She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired."

"People think it’s a failure to live alone. But it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else."

"Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them."

"“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.” The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway."

"Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens."

"Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more."

"It was virtually impossible to think of a sentence that made a positive use of that dreadful word ‘enough’, let alone one that started raving about ‘nothing’."

"The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly."

"They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money."

"More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often."

"How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you’ve got plenty o’ nuthin’, whereas we’re weighted down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits."

"When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why."

"And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change."

"The passage he was to read was from Revelations — or Obfuscations, as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason."

"The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience."

"As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions."

"What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?"

"He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death."

"Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money."

"He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?"

"No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce."

"Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village."

"When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure."

"Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet."

"No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one."

"All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods."

"It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time."

"Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?"

"‘Aren’t people funny? I don’t find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,’ lied the Princess."

"But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?"

"What is a strain is being forced into the lobster pot of good behaviour while being forced to sing its praises."

"Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent."

"His decision to study the law had got him as far as hiring Twelve Angry Men from a video shop."

"The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates."