"I feel that Morrissey has achieved the impossible. It is the straightforward that eludes him. He had to become famous because, although he is a savant the auditorium, he is a dead loss in a launderette."
"The partnership of Morrissey and Marr is comparable to that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and, later, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, in that it was a marriage of almost licentious fecundity."
"With Morrissey, the direct approach or the approach without charm, rarely works. One must learn to play canasta."
"In the expanse of time that I have known him, there has never been a partner or long-term girlfriend, or boyfriend. Exactly why this should be so is an enduring conundrum. However, it is true that the longer one lives alone the more one comes accustomed to, if not steeped in, one's own marmalade. As one passes into maturity, domestic routine becomes an ineluctable destiny. One might yearn for companionship, but not at the cost of someone marching in and altering a perfectly good kitchen roster that has suited you since Bananarama disbanded."
"Morrissey's spiritual home is neither Los Angeles nor Stretford but, in fact, Sidcup."
"I have at times felt his acute loneliness and it is seemingly an unbridgeable emptiness. It is not diabetes or an insufficiently warmed-up fishcake in Carcassonne that will undo you (as it nearly did me), but loneliness. Loneliness can suffocate you with the sheer weight of hourly, if not minutely, desolation. In a conversation that endeavoured to map the geometry of seclution, I said, finally, 'I think you have to be more socially available.' 'What do you want me to do, hang above Henley-on-Thames in an air balloon?' In the absence of a partner, I believe the stockpile of all that unspent love and desire has been, if not sublimated, discharged into the world as fusillades of epic biography. But, it's not all Hebridean weather fronts stacking up and waiting to roll in to darken one's dawn. Morrissey bears his inner solitude manfully and, despite it, is rarely without that sabre-like sense of humour. Simply, he is the funniest person I have ever met. As I write this, he is technically homeless and virtually lives on tour. Unbidden, because I'm a busybody who is unable not to interfere in the affairs of others, I tried to tempt him towards a variety of unusual or modern homes, and away from living in a gothic, Robert Bloch novel. 'And the beauty of it is, your existing furniture would give this particular space an interesting tension with absolutely no need to re-cover.' 'Tension?' 'Interest.' 'I can't sort tonight out, never mind remodel a windmill in Provence.' 'What about the bungalow on Crest Court, then?' 'I'm not going into a bungalow, it's far too OAP. Where is it?' 'Beverly Hills.' 'Well, it sounds like East Ham.'"
"Morrissey remains, for the greater part, an enigma. You may feel that you have peeled away 'the mask', but beneath it lies another. You can try removing that one too, but it's pointless. To uncover the real Morrissey requires only to intently listen to the words."
"My life has been enriched for having known and shared the friendship of such an absorbing, stimulating and, at times, compellingly awkward person. After thirty-two years, even I cannot quite figure him out. I no longer wish to. It is an association that has nothing to do with Earl Grey tea, buttered crumpets or epigrams, but one founded upon a shared folk memory of a countercultural England that produced eccentricity, subversive genius and, in its finest moments, footwear radicalism. It occurs to me only now that, following that telephone call so many autumns and hemline lengths ago, I might have been his very first fan."