“ The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anat… Edward St. Aubyn
“ In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down. Edward St. Aubyn
“ We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting. Edward St. Aubyn
“ Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars… Edward St. Aubyn
“ Is there ever anything to get worried about,' Peter couldn't help asking, 'when there are so many things to worry about duly? Edward St. Aubyn
“ An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against som… Edward St. Aubyn
“ In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture. Edward St. Aubyn
“ Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefo… Edward St. Aubyn
“ The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls. Edward St. Aubyn
“ How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought... Edward St. Aubyn
“ It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastr… Edward St. Aubyn
“ He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sof… Edward St. Aubyn
“ Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches an… Edward St. Aubyn
“ I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, the present, disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap! Edward St. Aubyn
