Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.
It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book?
Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks.
Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away…and forgiveness descends.
There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.
The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning?
When you are in your twenties, if even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.
…I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.
wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime’s internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book.
Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.
There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.
..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
… forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on.
I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas.
If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.
Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.
Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.
The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn’t look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.
Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.