When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.
What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless c...
What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
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 kids li...
What better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you?
We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That’s the thing about television comedy, isn’t it? It makes us all a part of something. That’s what I love...
We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes – usual...
We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have...
This is a song by Emmylou Harris called ‘Boulder to Birmingham,’ she announces. It’s on the album Pieces of the Sky, which Rob is selling this afternoon for the unbelievable price of five pounds and n...
Thirty years on, things have changes to the extent that Wayne Rooney could comfortably afford to employ the best-paid banker in Britain full-time, if he could see any purpose or momentary amusement in...
They’d been told, several times, by colleagues … that the sea was warmer over there [abroad], and the skies bluer, and the food was like nothing you could buy in London no matter how much you spent. B...
There was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections...
The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but tha...
The other dancers were embarrassed themselves, which meant that they weren't actually embarrassing; they weren't doing much more than tapping their feet, and the only way you could tell they were danc...
The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable...
That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the...
Thank you,' said Annie. 'Second thing : Juliet is brilliant. Don't lump the music in with the rest of it.''Have you been taking any of this in ?''Yes. You're a very bad man. You've been a useless fath...
Talán mi túl magas lángon éljük az életünket, mi, akik egész nap érzelmes dolgokat szívunk magunkba, és emiatt aztán soha nem tudjuk egyszerűen csak elégedettnek érezni magunkat: az kell, hogy vagy bo...
Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophreni...