Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
We all have names we don't know about.
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .
When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.
It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
