The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you...

I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do...

People say it’s not what happens in your life that matters, it’s what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your...

When I’m working I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing...

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I...

We’d never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation – foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose – was...

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they...

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an...

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off – or pimp themselves out – as art....

Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.

He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to “imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited.” In such a society there would be no more essays...

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they’ll forget all the bad stuff