I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

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.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

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.