When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
When it comes to the dead, it is hard to retain, or posthumously acquire, treasuredom. Being a Great Writer in itself has little to do with the matter. The important factors are: 1) An ambassadorial q...
When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. Peopl...
What he didn’t – or couldn’t – tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger.
What happened to the truth is not recorded.
Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.
We may choose to freeze a moment and say that it all 'began' then, but as an historian I have to tell you that such labelling is intellectually indefensible. What we are looking at is almost always a...
We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versi...
We listen to what people say, we read what they write—that’s our evidence, that’s our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker’s words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye,...
To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.
Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]
This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve - or make usefully vivid - the contradictio...
They say time finds you out, don’t they?
They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.
There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn’t take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarel...
Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first a...
The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it;
The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.
The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.
That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.