None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?
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.
History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it.
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that’s what caused me to be like this, it’s not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.
Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary.
That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.