Passion was a part of being human.
I have made myself more complicated than I really am.
It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.
It made him different, and because he was different he felt uncomfortable, and because he felt uncomfortable he could feel himself floating away for everyone and everything.
In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.
And it's not that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live any more. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home.
We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
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 not reading and whatever that makes you good or bad. It's whether you rape people, or get addicted to crack and go out mugging.
Falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.
One of the depressing things one realizes as one gets older is how much of one's tastes and attitudes are simply products of economic circumstance at the time.
Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it...then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.
The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.
And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.
What went wrong? Nothing and everything.
If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing suicide is an even worse sin, then Someone's done his sums wrong. Someone's overcharging.
You just...you just don't do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something, and most of the time you think rubbish. You always seem to miss what's really happening.
Seeing as he wasn't very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.
It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.
It seems to me quite often that the journeys of young women are more moving because they are hemmed in more, and dramatically it's more interesting to think about and write about people whose lives are circumscribed in some way.
She wished she didn't spend so much time worrying about the end of it all, but she couldn't help it. Being at the top of your career was like being at the top of a Ferris wheel: you knew that you had to keep moving, and you knew which way you were going. You had no choice.
You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. Look at me! I'm not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun! Tragic. I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk.
Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by.
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.
She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.
Writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.
The problem here is that unless a team is playing well, winning things, filling their stadia, clubs simply cannot afford to alienate the very.
You could refuse to care about fashion if you wanted to, but if you were going to spend all your time in the company of with - it people, you needed to know when they were laughing at you.
We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.
Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself.
I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.
The fuck? he said.
It takes a child to say the unsayable.
I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper.
It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting.
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?
I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.
Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one.
Men use music and football to fill up holes in their lives.
One can only presume that people who say that their favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much.
This script was like a dish made from things you'd found in your larder and had to use up before they went off: a Welsh mountain, a casino, a blonde with a big bust.
Here's how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life.
If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.
Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.
