Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

…I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.

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.

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.