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.

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

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.

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

He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.

All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.