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.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
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.
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.
My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you’re allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm.
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.
Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.
Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.
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. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence
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?
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
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 any harm. All I wanted was a good time.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.
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 poetry there.