Als ik slimmer was geweest, had ik regelmatig onderzoek Iaten mislukken. Dat was realistischer, rationeler en sluwer geweest. Maar dat kon ik niet. Ik was een junkie geworden.

A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

I should have done my novel before this, but I was a journalist and a junkie for 20 years and unlike the junkie cliché, I had good jobs all over the world. I was a books editor, I did financial journalism for Asia Week for five years, I was Bombay correspondent for the South China Morning Post for 18 months, I worked for every newspaper in India doing arts journalism. I was a hardworking junkie.

I'm like a junky without an addiction.

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsiously crave a wee bit ay silence.

A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

I think that anyone who is a true junkie has an innate kinship with other junkies. Somehow I knew that we shared mutual interests; that addiction speaks to you. Without knowing it, you’re attracted to them.

When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before.

I've seen the needle and the damage done.
A little part of it in everyone.
But every junkie's like a settin' sun.

If I had been smarter then I would have let research fail regularly. That would have been more realistic, more rational and more cunning. But I could not do that. I had become a junkie.

One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago, when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves. A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me the magic of childhood. It never fails, I thought, just like a shot; I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff.

We have so many drugs now, electronic and chemical, that most of us are junkies most of the time.

Everything I've been through, twenty–nine years strung out on dope, the hard time in prison, and an endless obsession with romantic entanglements——were parts of a journey that I'm just now beginning to understand.