You were going to take me bikini shopping? Not me, dear. Patsy. I’m not interested in looking at curvy young women in bikinis. I’m deeply in love with my wife and I’m only interested in money.
You know the worst thing aboutbeing rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped bysomebody, then it wouldn’t seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn’t b...
Will suddenly remembered that a boy at his old school had had a mum like Fiona - not exactly like her, because it seemed to Will that Fiona was a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies a...
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unha...
When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.
When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum's lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish , but I couldn't help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn't want to be sixteen, or fifteen or...
When I look at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirt...
What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day - because how could you? - is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him,...
What came first the music or the misery?People worry about kids playing with guns,or watching violent videos,that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about the kids li...
We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate...
This, really, is the bottom line, the chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinem...
This script was like a dish made from things you’d found in your larder and had to use up before they went off: a Welsh mountain, a casino, a blonde with a big bust.
The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Tapi, ini adalah hal paling mengerikan yang pernah ia lihat bahkan dari kejauhan sekalipun, dan ia menyadarinya pada momen ketika ia berjalan masuk, hal itu adalah sesuatu yang akan terus terngiang di...
Sì, scrivere un libro all'anno è decisamente fattibile: basta buttare giù cinquecento parole al giorno (meno di un quarto di questa rubrica) all'incirca per otto mesi. Ma così rimangano soltanto quatt...
Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t listen to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to repl...
Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver,...
So, as she walked down the stairs into the club, she was looking forward to a seething, teeming, wriggling, wiggling throng of dancers, many of whom she'd recognize: she wanted to see former pupils, l...
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and...
She’d always suspected that she was the sort of girl who wouldn’t go home to see a sick father if she had a shot at a television series, but she’d rather hoped that the news would be revealed slowly,...