One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.