To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.

For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

Sometimes I wish that I hadn't learned how to crochet," I say, and Alice laughs. Obviously she thinks I'm joking, which is maybe for the best.

I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

So must people hate their jobs.That's why they're called it jobs

He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?