I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.
It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.
The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.
There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.
And then she frowned, and shook her head, then put her arms around him once more, pressing her face into his shoulder, making a noise that sounded almost like rage. 'What's up?' he asked. 'Nothing. Oh, nothing. Just...' She looked up at him. 'I thought I'd finally got rid of you.' 'I don't think you can.' he said
The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.
I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.
He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?
Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.
If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.
Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.
A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.
but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.
Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?
Don’t keep fighting battles that are already lost.
She shouldn't speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.
…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.
If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?
Maybe we've grown out of each other.
I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.' 'Treated like what?' She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.
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