If you’re my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can’t, and if I can’t talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?

He hadn’t been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of...

Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill?

Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’. I have always been...

No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she had once been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct...

All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain...

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

Maybe we’ve grown out of each other.

Paris was all so… Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really...

An amusing story? She jabs the call button as if poking an eye. She doesn’t want an amusing story, she wants change, a break, not anecdotes. Her life has been stuffed with anecdotes, an endless...

The unrequited love of ones’ only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn

What are you going to do with your life?” In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the...

It’s scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?””It’s meant to be lavender.””No, Dex – it’s money. It smells of money.

He’s had quite a hard season for a young horse so maybe we’ll see him next year, or maybe we’ll see him at the back end of this year,

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really...

Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had...

Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I’ll always remember it

Happyish. Well, happyish isn’t so bad.”It’s the most we can hope for.

But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines – it’s history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind’s organised response to the world around him, or...

I don’t think this is really his trip as he would probably prefer six furlongs but he was given a great ride by Adrian — if he’d gone round them then he wouldn’t have won.

I’m just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.”Treated like what?’She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. ‘Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.

He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a...

This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.

Keep the change,” he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than “Keep the change”?

[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she...

I applied for the University of Life. Didn’t get the grades.

My wife, Alex rides him every day and has always said he’s a good horse,

No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that...

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging...

And sometimes I get carried away, that’s all. If you weren’t so…judgemental all the time-“”Am I? I don’t think I am . I try not to be. I just don’t…” She stopped herself speaking, shook...

For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing...

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak...

We’ll play it by ear. He’s in good form himself so we’ll just have to see on a weekly basis.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead? It was unrealistic to expect a friendship to last forever…

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions – fear, desire, anger – serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost...

You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.

Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.

I considered the concept of “oversharing”, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.

What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the...

The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. ‘Beautiful,’ she sighed, though in truth it could...

What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice,...

He swatted at her with his book. “Shut up and read, will you?”He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.

Can I say something?”Go on”I’m a little drunk”Me too. That’s okay.”Just….I missed you, you know.”I missed you too.”But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and...

Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to...