Quotes from Alexander Masters

Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, censor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill. Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of companionship?

Sometimes, I think I'm the child of the Devil. Honestly, I do believe that. I've invited the Devil in, and now I can't get him out. I've tried burning him out and cutting him out and he don't take no notice. Why should he? He doesn't want to be homeless. He's got me. Little, skinny, violent me.

Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

The physicist's picture of the world encompasses the entire sweep from future to past. The junction between the two, that minuscule ring of the present that matters so much to us, has no distinctive theoretical role.

Her life was a failure because she never focused on anything in particular. She didn't know how to concentrate her attention.

Diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody's head. It is a horrible place. All that repetition; that endless analysis that doesn't analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality.

The feeling that everyone feels, of a life not lived.

Here lies … /Who did nothing/Went nowhere/Was loved by nobody.

Skeptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about.

The opening trick to becoming is to convince yourself that you already are

Her ordinariness, and the fact that she has written so much about it, is what makes her interesting.

there is very little connection between law and justice.

Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of forty-two years. They are thirty-five times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. In

A person can write five million words about itself, and forget to tell you its name. Or its sex. People don't include obvious identifiers in diaries: things such as what they're called or where their home is. They are simply 'I' who lives.

It's a question I often ask myself: what would I do with me? And I don't know the answer. I don't know what I'd do, except run away.

I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.

But one of Stuart's most personable (and most annoying) qualities is his refusal to judge strangers until he knows them, especially if they're peculiar.

If Stuart is a freak... it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death. If Stuart's a freak, I salute freaks.

I wish I wasn't me.

For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.

You'd think the homeless would despise the rest of us, but it seems the thing they want to do most is talk. If only they could sit us down and let it all spill out - every twist of their history, down to the last murmur - then they'd be cured.

Disobedience is one of the few tricks you have left to hang on to the idea that you continue to exist distinctively and are still reliably connected to the person who bore your name on the outside.

At this time of day it should have been open and full of fifty fellow smackheads, crackheads, psychotics, epileptics, schizophrenics, self-harmers, beggars, buskers, car thieves, sherry pushers, ciderheads, just-released-that-morning convicts, ex-army, ex-married-men-with-young-children-who'd-discovered-their-wife-in-bed-with-two-members-of-the-university-rowing-team-at-the-same-time.