They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.
These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less an...
There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.
There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?
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 panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them agai...
The one thing that is very good in life today is death.
The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a fr...
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.
That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to underst...
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the...
Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kurią gali įsimylėti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.
Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema...
Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, People tell me it’s a c...
One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes—a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wil...
Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn't love.