I don’t think you can call it stalking when it’s just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.
The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.
It’s love this and love that but of couse it’s so easy to love someone you don’t know, whether it’s George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you’ve ever shared Christmas turkey- now there’s a miracle.
It’s not what you like but what you are like that’s important.
So now what? What happens when words fail us?
So it’s not about what you do. It can’t be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that’s where I get eaten up.
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
I’m a good person. In most ways. But I’m beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn’t count for anything very much, if you’re a bad person in one way.
Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.
Phone calls like ours only happen when you’ve spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.
The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn’t know that we wanted to know – we’re just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.
There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.
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.
No man is an island...
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.
If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already.
He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.
The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose.