316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look. ”
“Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortablewe're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.”
“It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the booksnot part of me, all of meand then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”
“I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became ...”
“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.”
“It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.”
“Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)”
“For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.”
“The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.”
“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers ...”
“She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in t...”
“Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.”
“Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.”
“You have a dress with a dcolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar ...”
“Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known ...”
“The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk th...”
“Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.”
“Passion out of passion's obstacles.”
“No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the hea...”
“...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down”
