I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a...

(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his...

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid… well, they’ve started to give me a little pang or something – not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet,...

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress…Actually,...

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with ‘Got To Get You Off My Mind’, but then...

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But ‘Are you playing, Bob?’ is...

Jess thought for a moment. ‘You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there’s always that bit when the baddie slips...

Read any women’s magazine and you’ll see the same complaint over and over again: men – those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on – are hopeless in bed. They are not interested...

At hun er i live er bra, men det er ikke dét det handler om.

It’s not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and...

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading — about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another,...

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything

Some of my favorite songs: ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by Neil Young; ‘Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me’ by the Smiths; ‘Call Me’ by Aretha Franklin; ‘I Don’t Want to Talk...

I don’t mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way–characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don’t fit, the whole works–is simply asking too much of a reader....

It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you’re carrying out...

I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and...

It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private – we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly...

He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.

when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion… it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed...

(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the “Arts and Lit non-fiction section)I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

A veces hemos de ser juzgados por nuestros actos únicos.

You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed...

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.

Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

Funny + sad is what I’m pitching for, every time.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone’s cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face… It didn’t add up. Suicide wasn’t invented for people like this. It was invented...

What good were real feelings anyway?

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being...

What was in it for me? I wasn’t asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn’t she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could,...

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

Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think...

It didn’t help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me...

I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not the best sleeper.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

Det var nästan som att upptäcka en författare man inte läst, fast man stöter i och för sig hela tiden på författare som man inte har läst medan det är mycket sällsynt, åtminstone i vuxen...

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both...

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn’t just march into a recording studio and start howling. He’d have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the...

All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I’m beginning to see why people don’t do it more often.

We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.

What did I think I was doing? What did she think she was doing? When I want to kiss people in that way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, it’s because I want...

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,...