“I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

“When I was a kid, my parents got me into piano, viola, and trombone. They were the three instruments I went through. The moment I started playing trombone, which was the last one before guitar, I knew I wanted to play guitar really badly. I was a huge Metallica fan, and I’m really into Slash. I’ve always thought he was the coolest dude, and like the greatest guitar player. He’s awesome, and I love the fact that he did everything himself. He made the world of guitar fit around him, rather than him fitting around the world of guitar, which I think is really cool.”

“Give me everything you have," I told [Preston].
"Really, Cammie. I never knew you thought of me that way.”

“I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.”

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.”

“I always thought that
I was me — but no,
I was you
and never knew it.”

“Remember the pain?' thought Artemis. I hate myself. I really do.”

“I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.”

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

“I wasn't into glam-rock. I was just into him. I never really saw him as glam-rock. Actually, I liked T-Rex too. Electric Warrior was great. But Bowie made me think. I just got lost in it—Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust—that era. I thought it was just magical, although I was dead impressionable then. But I though he looked brilliant—I still do. I hated the following he had though, especially around the Aladdin Sane era—it just destroyed his mystique. He doesn't hold that mystique for me now—he's just a normal bloke, I suppose. But I remember in 1972 when he was on the telly doing "Starman"—I couldn't believe it! It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It's meant to be a bit of an embarrassing admission now to have liked that kind of thing, but I really did. And I remember when I grew out of it and I couldn't get into Ziggy Stardust the way I used to. I felt really sad about it. I played it and nothing happened.”