You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

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.

Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.