The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance....

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can...

Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is...

you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that...

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

Life versus death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, old age versus death.

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck...

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods–the long-distance phone call, the telegram–were marked “For Emergency Use Only.” So my parents...

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities;...

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

And that was all the part of it – the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name...

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind...

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

Margarita mėgdavo sakyti, kad yra dvi rūšys moterų: tos, kurios matomos kiaurai, ir tos, kurios nešioja paslaptį. Ir kad tai yra svarbiausia, ką vyrai išsyk pajunta, ir svarbiausia, kas juos patraukia arba ne. Vienus traukia...

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents–were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and...

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic,...

Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Mes baigėme mokyklą, pasižadėjome draugauti visą gyvenimą ir nuėjome skirtingais keliais

Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks.

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn’t look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed...

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find...

This was long before the term ‘single-parent family’ came into use; back then it was a ‘broken home’…

wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so...

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very...

Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing...

A pier is a disappointed bridge.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit...

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives — and time itself — would...

You can take Lucas to watch football when he’s older,’ she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different...

It’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it’s] delight in, and play with,...

History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.