Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said–

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites,...

Anyway, that’s why you do it. Not to be famous, just to be good. To do good work. Find the thing you really love doing, and do it to the best of your ability.

Nevertheless she feels a great wave of affection for Dexter Mayhew. In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I...

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.

Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we’d actually “done it properly,” which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.

I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not...

Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words...

And there it is again, the look. There’s no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one’s gone wrong. It’s not what I wanted.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

This not-hotness had weighed heavily on his mind, but he tried to dismiss it as envy. Envy was just the tax you paid on success.There had been other sacrifices on his part. Regretfully he had...

Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak...

You know what i can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, i mean endlessly, i’ve been telling you...

And is that what love looks like — all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?””Sometimes it is.

He’s wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I’d sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion...

There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up and then...

You should visit the Palatine. It’s at the top of that hill . . .””I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.””Yes, who was emperor back then?

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it’s enough to tell a few good jokes.

Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical....

Call me sentimental, but there’s no-one in the world that I’d like to see get dysentery more than you

I’m just not going to do it so that we can say that we’ve done it. And I’m not going to do it if the first thing you say afterwards is ‘please don’t tell anyone’...

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.

Who’s he seeing now then?””No idea. They’re like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.

In portraiture I look for people that I recognise – ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ – or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for...

Él puso suavemente una mano en la nuca, a la vez que ella le ponía suavemente la suya en la cadera, y se dieron un beso en la calle, rodeados de gente con prisa por...

This is me.’” He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose...

Maybe they’re in love.””And is that what love looks like – all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?””Sometines it is.

The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.