Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.

In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.

There are many reasons, of course, why someone might snap their fingers and grin. If you heard some pleasing music, for instance, you might snap your fingers and grin to demonstrate that the music had charms that could soothe your savage breast. If you were employed as a spy, you might snap your fingers and grin in order to deliver a message in secret snapping-and-grinning code.

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.

Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.