What I’ve discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can’t really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
One has to have the courage of one’s pessimism.
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people – there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?
This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they’re innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
When people ask, “Is there any advice you’d give a young writer?,” I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
I’ve always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.