You've got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it's unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it'll be a cyanide capsule.

…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.

But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man

David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the '90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother's name, she'd be touched.

Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.' 'It's the most we can hope for.

As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.