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?’...

You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.” That would be a bit strong.

When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that’s like an emotive word, “stalker”, isn’t it? I don’t think you can call it stalking when it’s just phone calls and letters and...

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have...

Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours’ reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate...

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn’t hear a squeak out of it.

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own

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...

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you...

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state...

I’m never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there’s nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one’s otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. …Being a...

You wouldn’t believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can’t take anymore, and then it’s off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that’s...

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.

Sometimes you know you’ve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn’t so messed up, it wouldn’t be like that. If the world was normal, a...