The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.
In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of the father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, au...
But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears befo...
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially d...
This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the sa...
They grow up so quickly, don’t they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric,...
If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.
I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down th...
He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them al...
But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. —
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point...
Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she'd had enough of in her time: usually it meant, 'Sorry about last night but here it is anyway'; and sometimes it meant, 'This'll make...
Forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
لكن الزمن.. كيف يعلمنا الزمن في البداية ثم يربكنا. كنا نظن أننا ناضجون في الوقت الذي كنا آمنين فيه فقط. تصورنا أننا نتحلى بالمسئولية في الوقت الذي كنا فيه جبناء فقط. ما أسميناه واقعية تبين أنه ما هو إ...
When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which th...