From a 2003 Guardian piece on River Phoenix, on what was then the tenth anniversary of his death at age twenty-three:

“His mother said that she’d been in labour with River for 48 hours,” he recalls, “and that she was convinced he hadn’t really wanted to be born. She thought he had struck some sort of deal so that he wouldn’t have to stay very long on this earth.”

The prince from Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles:

“Probably children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.”

Henry from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing:

“Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”