"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."

"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, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time."

"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 realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules."

"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."

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

"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."

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time."

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

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

"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."

"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, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there."

"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?"

"You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God."

"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 patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about. But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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 and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not."

"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."

"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 up, you should have got to me earlier."

"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."

"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."

"Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?"

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

"He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones."

"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 over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all."

"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."

"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, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan."

"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 reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path."