316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”
“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”
“A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”
“I came to this city to escape.”
“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”
“We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of...”
“The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.”
“It's true that heroes are inspiring but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distres...”
“Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?”
“Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know youre getting old.”
“Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
“You’ll get over it…â€� It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘itâ€� is the person you loved. The...”
“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, th...”
“He: What’s the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they...”
“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”
“I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable t...”
“I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in thei...”
“It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”
“Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.”
“Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imag...”
