But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.

I never really recovered from the shock of discovering that women do what we do; they save their best pairs for the nights when they are going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house; your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever amen...those dreams crumble to dust.

It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.

The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.

It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.