It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

I have always been accused of taking the things I love – football, of course, but also books and records – much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic – maybe it’s those voices I can hear when I write. ‘You’re a WANKER, X.’ ‘The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you.

I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.