She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

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!)

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.

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.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

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.