Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically. - John Fowles

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.