After he left, the three of us sat on a bench worn to the wood by all the fidgeting bottoms that had occupied it before us. - Michael Nava

[Dr Hayward, to Henry, after his heart attack] "Sex is not going to kill you — well, let me amend that. Safe sex is not going to kill you."

Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.

The isolation that was so much a part of the city's psyche, the feeling that its ten million people were all living parallel lives that never intersected