Quote collection
226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that."
"It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone."
"A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder."
"For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is."
"It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood."
"I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter."
"Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?"
"She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence."
"Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control."
"Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad."
"All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies."
"I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight."
"It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby."
"When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month."
"This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give."
"When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing."
"To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now."
"First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else."
"People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them."
"It was a kiss from the past."