Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.
Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
Style isn't something added on; it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.
My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.
My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.
This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.
It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.
America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal
Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.