The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. - Iain Banks

The only sin is selfishness.

He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You live there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”
“Well, for me it is—was—just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occurred. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”

He was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel.