If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say. - Martin Amis

And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there'd be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind's bacteria would be forming new armies. I'd come up with something to get me down...

Was this the case with everyone — everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of 'having problems' — or 'having a harder life than most people', or 'having a harder life than you usually had' — was spurious. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.

It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.