Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will… - Martin Amis

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

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.