“I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me.”

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me.

Just hold on. Just for a minute.” “Are you all right ?” I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.

How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?

You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.

I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen…It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

I am conscious that knowing me has caused you pain, and grief, and I hope that one day when you are less angry with me and less upset you will see not just that I could only have done the thing that I did, but also that this will help you live a really good life, a better life, than if you hadn’t met me.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice.

Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.

We do two things in life: We race the clock and everything is a struggle. One way or not, it’s a metaphorical battle all of the time.

You can’t buy time. Everything, for me, seems to be a race against time. Especially musically.

The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate.

At the Oscars, if you didn’t vote for ’12 Years a Slave’ you were a racist.

I’m not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That’ll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

Like my father, I believe that nonviolence is the antidote to what he called ‘the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism.’ These three evils were consuming our hopes for community in 1964, and, fifty years later, we remain divided because of their festering effects.