“The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.”

A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel

Why does life need evidence of life?

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

I want to feel sympathetic and close to others, not opposed to them.

The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials — they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think — rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

It’s exciting to be with really, really good people. Some people make you feel like you’ve got to up your game.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

I don’t think there’s any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done.

There’s a good-feel factor about Sheffield Wednesday.

It keeps it more of a surprise. I don’t feel like it has to be a mystery.