Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love festivals, period.
Generally, I'm not anti the novel.
The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.
I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.
I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.
The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion.
Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.
People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.
My evangelical phase about Burning Man is well and truly in the past.
It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness.
The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.
I've seen 'Stalker' more times than any film except 'The Great Escape.'
Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.
For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.
There's something awful about Oxford, I think. It's such a little ghetto.
I've always had this belief that you want to write about universal truths.
I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.
In terms of behaving in a civic way, I feel my behavior is always exemplary.
One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.
Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff
All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.
I like things that are funny and have a lot else in them besides that - ideas, for example.
Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation. Not even jealousy, just irritation.
Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."
If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.
One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at.
Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.
I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.
You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.
I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.
I didn't get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.
In terms of target audience, who cares what a middle-aged guy like me wants; most mainstream are not catering to me at all.
What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
Physical violence is always a bore in films today. We don't see how much it hurts. We don't learn the true consequences of it.
The ritual of film-going in some sense replaced that of churchgoing, because you share something communal, sometimes mystical.
As soon as I hear that there's something to get used to, I know that I won't; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it.
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.
We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.
I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.
Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six, and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty.
Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.
In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.
I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.
These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.
Once you've got through immigration, one is always made to feel very welcome in America, once they've let you in. It's a great place to be.
Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.