Julian Barnes on Footballers

"You can take Lucas to watch football when he's older", she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on the patch - See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football.

- The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

The Skin & Dreams of Saul Bellow

Just read an Observer article on the letters of Saul Bellow accompanied by an interview with his last wife, Janis:

"And sure enough, when I ask Janis how she prefers to remember him – how she would describe him to an old girlfriend as if she had met him only yesterday – it is not his giant brain she thinks of first, nor his amazing facility with words, nor even the fact that, as she told me earlier, he had "read everything, six times". It is his physicality, the way he felt in her arms. "He had beautiful skin, healthy young skin, even at the end. He wasn't exactly tall, but he had this broad upper body, these giant arms." She slips into the present tense. "He's the kind of person you're so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He's so full of excitement, and energy." She presses her hands to her chest, and closes her eyes"

Also in the same article, from Bellow's letter to Martin Amis:
"Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc"

The 4 women

" Used to say there was four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman"

Billy Pretty in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx.