Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.
Crazy enough to start a war. There aren’t many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced.
But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a so...
A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to an...
'this is real. This life. We're really here - this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it's real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that's a real thing and it hurts me.
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are no...
Although entrapment in this case was only another word for love.
[he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth
Well, you can't make old friends.
Was it wrong to hope to be happy?
Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...
They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take. • • •
There was a sense in which she couldn’t quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew—from Lambert only—that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotion...
There are so many different ways to be poor,
Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unw...
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea an...
She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospi...
Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But p...
Like millions of British people, we paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.