The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I’m not going to win either. It’s irrelevant.
It’s no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
I’m not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.
I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn’t it?
Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.
It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they’re dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.
Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.
You can only give things up once they start to let you down.
Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.
How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...
Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.
Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?
This time he was going to fall apart silently.
She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.
I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.
Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.
Old enough to remember the arrival of ‘Have a nice day’, Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of ‘Have a great one’. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? ‘You have a profound and meaningful day now.
What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.
They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise.