Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it...then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taki...
Non potevano dare alla gente quel che voleva, se non c'era gente lì a ricevere il dono
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading th...
Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. H...
Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, but they quite clearly weren't. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, a...
Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a wa...
Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.
La gente si preoccupa perché i ragazzini giocano con le armi, perché gli adolescenti guardano film violenti; c'è la paura che nei giovani finisca per imporsi una specie di cultura della violenza. Ness...
Just about everyone I've ever interviewed has told me that by doing something or other--recovering from cancer, climbing a mountain, playing the part of a serial killer in a movie--they have learned s...
I’ve never been happy in the way that I’ve been happy in this room, and in the studios, said Sophie. I’ve never laughed so much, or learned so much, and everything I know about my job is because of th...
It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- no...
It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted...
It is not the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my...
Is that thing actually going round? I can't tell
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer,...
In retrospect, their best chance of doing it this way was against Arsenal, in the game they won 8–2. They only needed another nine that afternoon – and they missed at least fifteen good chances.
I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.
I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading lit...
I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?
I was just going to have a discreet J R done on my upper arm, but Victor the tattooist wasn’t having any of it. Which one is she? ‘J’ or ‘R’? ‘J.’ And how long have you been seeing this ‘J’ bird, then...