They’re always looking forward to going places they’re just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
You use a different part of your heart with girls.
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational – to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he’s really proud of.
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it “vow-of-poverty prose.” No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It’s nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “What is it?” And the men will say, “Nothing. No it isn’t anything really. Just sad dreams.
Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings.
Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.
And while Trish stared – stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes – Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colour from the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, forming one triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died, releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along on its subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.
No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart – and then he put them back together again.
Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon.
People who go to the Opera, they don’t go to the toilet, not even at home.
Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the “miracle” of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.
Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.