“He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.”

“So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Let...”

“Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because ...”

“All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pu...”

“the crucial thing about an education is the opportunity tat it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley”

“Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we'd actually "done it properly," which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.”

“I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women and that was important to me back then would say, Oh, really? and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more car...”

“There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.”

“Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as too long.”

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have ...”

“Front grace in the shadows”

“People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.”

“Spirituality cannot be an excuse for not making money!!! Just a justification for failure!”

“The end of a relationship is not always a failure. Sometimes all the love in the world is not enough to save something. In these cases, it is not a matter of fault from either person. Some things c...”

“Success and failure will all come to pass like waves, only Nature remains”