The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it’s a joke, because of course it is never a joke.
The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.
Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn’t mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.
I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.
I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century’s most mysterious writers.
You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.
I sought trains; I found passengers.
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.
In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.