If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead...
I survived. ‘He survived to tell the tale’ – that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories o...
I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant.
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, i...
I didn’t want to press Veronica. I thought I’d wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, fo...
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much...
I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’ ‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed.
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the bo...
History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated.
Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs.
He didn’t go to church. He read The Times and the Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life.
Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave...
Gustave’s last years are arid and solitary. He
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out-perhaps especially when it doesn't work out-promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life.
But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we ca...
But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.
Back in 'my day' – though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to...
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.