“By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.”

“It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire”

“What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn't it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn't be Venice, said Connie's voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.”

“He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

“Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.”

“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.”

“I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.”

“I worry sometimes that I'm a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that's dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.”

“The unrequited love of ones' only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn”

“You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the girl of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.”

“Generally speaking, I resolve to change my life on average maybe thirty to forty times a week, usually at about two a.m, drunk, ore early the next morning, hungover.”