You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.

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.