Television is the only place where we banish ourselves from the community of the living, and where the superficial provides more virtue than the actual.

Where are there such boys who are fully and entirely content with simply being?

We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else. Our conclusions are our own, yet the landscape is infinite.

Battling against the schoolmasterly dullness of detestable poverty, we Irish Catholics know very well how raucous happiness displeases God, so there is much evidence of guilt in all we say and do, but nonetheless it is said and done.

More brittle and less courteous than anywhere else on earth, Manchester is the old fire wheezing its last, where we all worry ourselves soulless, forbidden to be romantic.

my heart sinks down into a new darkness. There is nothing I can salvage from this accusation, and the eyes pool, as I lose.

There is only ever a sense of change and of slipping away, but never a sense of security or stability.

All Manchester boys are mad, and they shout, and they laugh loudly, and courtship is a question of aggression rather than gallantry.

It was he who told me the reason why girls fluttered around me at St Wilfrid’s, and what it was that they wanted. He told me this because I didn’t know, and even when I knew, I was less interested than when I didn’t know.