Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.
Escape is a commodity like anything else.
It was a war scripted by Heller from a story by Orwell, and somebody would be bombing their own airfield before too long, no doubt.
It is good to remove oneself sometimes and get a sense of perspective from a little further away.
Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn’t it been clever? Yes, it had.
Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined – is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow.
And even a small amount of talent can go an appallingly long way, these days.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
You don’t belong to her and she doesn’t belong to you, but you’re both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you.
The music machine played away – far away – and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.
There was a layer of grey-blue smoke in the room at about shoulder level, and a big wave in it, probably produced by me as I came in through the double doors of the back porch. The wave rose slowly between us while my father stared at me.
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances – and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse – then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.
The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
He could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal – ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard – and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing. Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.
I’m doing fine. I eat dogs! Heh heh heh!’ I.
Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees.
Well, it is always easier to succeed at death.
Peddle one of the least harmful drugs humanity’s ever discovered, and you get twenty years. Peddle something that kills a hundred thousand a year... and you get a knighthood.