A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.
David NichollsOccasionally, very occasionally, say at four oโclock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isnโt broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: โget in a taxi nowโ or โI need to see you, we need to talkโ. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel โ independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
David NichollsTo 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.
David Nicholls