Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
Everywhere you look Britain, the States, western Europe people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That’s a mistake a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.
Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.
It’s true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.
The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.
An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it’s rather deadpan.
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom.
The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.
Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.
My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.
Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...
Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.
The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
Selfish men make the best lovers. They’re prepared to invest in the women’s pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.