Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where—and who—you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience the sixties until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that m...
Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?
Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And i...
We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young.
This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he woul...
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
There was something a bit sinister about Noah’s devotion to God; creepy, if you know what I mean.
The pigs and sheep you see walking around today are zombies compared to their effervescent ancestors on the Ark. They’ve had the stuffing knocked out of them. And some of them, like the turkey, have t...
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.
Tai ir yra gyvenimas, ar ne? Šiek tiek pasiekimų ir šiek tiek nusivylimų.
Such was humanity’s self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.
Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotte...
Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and...
Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do because they don’t depend on material in the same way.
Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.
Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your...
Manchmal glaube ich, es ist der Sinn des Lebens, uns mit seinem letzendlichen Verlust zu versöhnen, indem es uns zermürbt, uns beweist, auch wenn das eine Weile dauern kann, dass das Leben gar nicht s...
Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.