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.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
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.
So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.
The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.
Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?
Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.
These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going.
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.
Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.
[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.
To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.
Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.
I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.
Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.
Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
 is to be against life. )
This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.
When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.
Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.
But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.
 )
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
...with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.
Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably.
Who let the dogs in? ...This, we fear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?
, consumed all my free time. )
Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.
Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.
Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw.
As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.
I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.
After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.
There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.
In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.
She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.
, and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do. )
If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.
Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.
Evidentemente è questa la caratteristica della città contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.
Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich...Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich...The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.
Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.
It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?
On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions on Calchalk Street were softly cackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures, panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect.
Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren't going to help her out. They had been put together with only one thing in mind: to lock her in.
Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only an end.
Pain is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we’ve got the message.
Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available; this very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance to the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature -- he didn't know the brand -- of the availability.
If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say.
[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.
Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.
Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.
Making lots of money--it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch. ch. 1, p. 23 in Penguin paperback
Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.
It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.
Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings.
Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.
 )
Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)
How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.
Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.
