By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
He’d told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn’t offered morphine.
You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God.
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.
That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
What good were real feelings anyway?
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.
Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.
It’s just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.
Everything’s complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
Reading begets reading.
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.
We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.
I don’t believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.
Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they’ve started to give me a little pang or something – not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: “I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.
Have you got any soul?” a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.
Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.