The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten?...

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years,...

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary...

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

Tai, ką galiausiai prisimeni, ne visada yra tas pats, ką patyrei

… forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on.

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes...

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on...

Mariac tells us about the books he’s read, the painters he’s liked, the plays he’s seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger...

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?”History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly.’Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also...

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant...

…I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it...

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease....

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness...

WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and...

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book?

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that...

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make...

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind–or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a...

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs...

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you...

I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full...

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties–or, in my case, bits of...

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...

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that...

Logiškai mąstė, o paskui elgėsi logiška išvada. Tačiau daugelis iš mūsų, įtariu, daro priešingai: priima instinktyvų sprendimą, paskui kuria priežasčių infrastruktūrą jam pateisinti. O rezultatą pavadina sveiku protu.

The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, “No,...

But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a...

I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift...

But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The...

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling...

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those...

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and...

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making...