65 quotes found
Novelist, critic and journalist · British
British novelist, critic and journalist
“Very happy or unhappy, people disappear.”
“All paradises are there to be expelled from.”
“Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.”
“Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.”
“Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they ...”
“Its unthinkable, now to live as her parents had done, going to work from nine to five and enjoying the benefits of the newly-formed health and education services. What paradise it had seemed! Now, ...”
“Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each others washing.”
“He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. ...”
“There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.”
“Its all biology. If it werent for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldnt think of pretending otherwiseRomance is the true opiate of the masses.”
“I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pur...”
“Its not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, co...”
“They might watch American movies, wear American clothes, even read American books but Bush and the Iraq War have made actual American people social lepers; she only has to open her mouth in some pl...”
“Its so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen She stares out of her window at the busy stre...”
“What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How els...”
“The sudden acquisition of power does not go to the head, but to the groin. In some, it promotes lust; in others, supplants it. Those on whom its effect is purely cerebral may indeed be counted as f...”
“Novelists, said Ivo, are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actuall...”
“Few pretty and privileged young women really understand the essential injustice of biology...For most of her life as a woman, the rules were perfectly clear cut: other women were the enemy, and all...”
“Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom”
“That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.”
“A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothingCertain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they c...”
“Family is all politics. Everyone hates each others guts, if theyre honest Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big fami...”