The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
If what you want to do is write, then it’s madness not to do it.
It won’t be long before we’ll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That’s the way I do it, anyway.
I’m completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that’s intimate. I love books where you feel you’re having a romance with the writer.
Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.
I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness... A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.
After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs.
Perhaps the relevant truth- and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.