65 quotes found
“Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.”
“Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. Its not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there ...”
“It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's trueunless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at...”
“Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.”
“You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suici...”
“Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.”
“Its possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?”
“He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty...”
“Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didnt show you your reflection. It showed you your soulit showed you who you r...”
“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor,...”
“A writers life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be b...”
“The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.”
“I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Wel...”
“Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on...”
“The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of...”
“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy...”
“I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handj...”
“Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me...”
“You know, I wouldnt have done this a month ago. I wouldnt have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now Im just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch you...”
“I don't know why I wanted a girl,' he says, as if to himself. 'I mean, I wouldn't swap Louis, but when they said, 'It's a boy!', I thought: 'Oh, well.' Everyone else was incredibly pleased that it ...”
