I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.

Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad".

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.