"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 jokes even belong in proper books. I won't bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature."

"Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?"

"Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six, we were of that disposition."

"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."

"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, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me."

"Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness."

"The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not."

"My friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost."

"Easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret."

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

"We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts."

"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."

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

"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."

"He was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it..."

"Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways."

"What good were real feelings anyway?"

"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."

"Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination."

"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."

"You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more."

"I could feel the weight of everything then --- the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower block."

"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."

"Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs."

"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 fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become."

"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 thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."

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

"I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television."

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

"I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!"

"I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too."

"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 me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself."

"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 afraid of everything."

"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."

"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. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature."

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

"All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning."

"Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared."

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

"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 to love someone."

"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."

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

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

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

"When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all."

"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 rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself."

"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 by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back."

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

"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 loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun."

"Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody . . . There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable."