“…I was expert at the kind of hallucinatory economics that turned every snake into a ladder—whenever I dined in a fairly expensive restaurant, for instance, I calculated that I’d saved money by not dining in a very expensive one, and the money saved I tacked on to my inner bank account, as if it were money earned. Thus I became richer every time I ate out at my own expense…”

—Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 204.