Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids.
You can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.
I don’t want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.
Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.
It’s no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won’t find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.
Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.
I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn’t something I’m very good at.
But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.
Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.
You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.
Where’s the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn’t seem like superficial to me. These aren’t flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.
I’m coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?
It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
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.
You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you.
For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.