“I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.”

“Maybe anything's right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture. He straightened with a start. What was happening to him? … He was going to do something, but what? Yes, he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some nameless thing.”

“I've kind of made Jack a hero that I would like to have looked up to as a little boy because as a little boy, I knew I was gay but I didn't know what it was. Didn't know who to talk to about it. … I wanted kids to like him, and I wanted women, men, I wanted everyone to like him. But first I wanted people to hate him. I wanted them to think he was arrogant and pushy and too sure of himself. And I wanted them to follow the arc of the change he went through in the final episodes of Doctor Who.”

“There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother… Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.”

“He came to a halt in a hollow and got his breath back. He felt himself freed of a great burden by getting out of sight of other people. The previous days and nights had been eventful, and he had lost himself. But now he was sure he would find himself again, like a dead man who finds himself, little by little, in the next world. In spite of everything, and although he was in reality a newborn babe in this new world, it was delightful to be born anew and to own a share of the sun like others instead of having to wait half the year perhaps for one little ray of sunshine.... No, there's probably no way of making something cease to exist once it has come into existence. He was no longer afraid of the immortality of the soul, that doctrine which for a time had seemed to him the height of human cruelty. Today it was the many and various abodes of the Creator which enchanted the mind.... and death did not exist.”

“The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain […] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?”

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

“Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy,' he says.”

“The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses.”

“By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.”