Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
It was a kiss from the past.
It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She’d had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her t...
If these are ‘talents’ – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is ‘talent’? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?
If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.
If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.
I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity—intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once—I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astrid...
I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their fo...
I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people. To which you want to reply, Have you read the new Franze...
I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.
I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.Children...
I couldn’t afford to be offended.
Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned.
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost. Though
For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.
Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean. Another
But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had tho...