my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.

Dave and Serge…played the Fiddler’s Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor,...

And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I...

When it came down to it, he just wasn’t that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing “Both Sides Now” with your eyes closed; when...

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these...

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. … But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more...

Everyone knows the song that Millwall fans sing, to the tune of „Sailing”: ‘No one likes us/No one likes us/No one likes us/We don’t care.’ In fact I have always felt that the song is...

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and...

The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it’s all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the...

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

When your sad–like really sad–you only want to be with other people who are sad.

I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you’re reading something that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote...

Women who disapprove of men – and there’s plenty to disapprove of – should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.

Sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there’s music, and girls, and drugs,...

A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2...

I don’t know you. The only thing I know about you is, you’re reading this. I don’t know if your happy or not; I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope...

My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them...

In other words, it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!

It would be nice to think that as I’ve got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be...

You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you.

And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there’s no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

You may think that you don’t want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you’ll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

Clockers” asks–almost in passing, and there’s a lot more to it than this–a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals,...

…So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is...

It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening...

I’m human. That’s how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” I denied it, of course. But then, anything – smashing up a new car, persuading Donald Rumsfeld to come to an Islington flat in the early hours of New...

That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity – the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired...

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally...

You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you...

I used to believe, although I don’t now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will,...

I used to think–and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do–that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you...

Years and years ago, I read a great interview with Jam and Lewis, the R&B producers, in which they described what it was like to be members of Prince’s band. They’d sit down, and Prince...

Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me...

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you’re a Person of Letters or merely someone who...

That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn’t mind if I touched her or not.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in...

I love the relationship that anyone has with music … because there’s something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. …...

It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.

I’ve committed to nothing…and that’s just suicide…by tiny, tiny increments.

We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. ‘What does that mean, then?’...