I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains. - Nick Hornby

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.