The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong–once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.
A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life.
The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn’t even bother to respond.
Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.
Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn’t dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid’s view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.
As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.
In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored.
of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.
You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.