The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still - otherer people - knew what the other people meant when they said it.
Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have...
He was perfect in his way,’ said Patrick.
Earl, who seemed to be in an almost perpetual state of amazement at the things he said, shook his head again.
Made him more conscious of how little experience he had of saying what he meant.
The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn’t know how she’d cope without Buckingham Palace,’ Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porl...
The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.
Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and...
One seldom knows whether perseverance is noble or stupid until it’s too late.
It was unbelievable, there was the dry-cleaning ticket again. There must be more than one.
But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors. I don’t supp...
A celebrity these days is somebody you’ve never heard of,
Observe everything . . . trust nobody . . . despise your mother . . . effort is vulgar . . . things were better in the eighteenth century.
What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?
The trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.
She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.
Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won't drink too much, give up, get divorced, become me...
It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place,
It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.