Please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe- because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us know what kind of an effort this represents for the individual re...
Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-he...
Manchester United would have retained the Premiership if they’d won this game – or, of course, if they’d won any of the other games they drew during the course of the season. Or, seeing as one extra p...
Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.
L'amore, evidentemente, è antidemocratico come il denaro: si accumula attorno a persone che ne hanno già fin troppo: i sani di mente, i sani nel corpo, gli amabili
Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy--but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass--the edge of the left cheek, say.
Ken didn't die for your benefit, you know. It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the flm of your life story. Of course. Isn't that how it works for everybody?
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased...
If you’ve found the right person, you’ve found the right person, it doesn’t matter how old you are.
I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do.What? For a moment Will was completely bewildered. Tough in your head, Do what you do… These were not phr...
I have made myself more complicated than I really am.
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a re...
I can live this life. I can. I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse at the night sky..., and I can see that there...
He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.
Fifteen years was a long time in the life of a woman, though, when those fifteen years had been disappointing.
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.
But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country,...
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm...