On Brexit:What have they done? we said to each other, sometimes meaning the leaders, who we felt must have known what they were doing, and sometimes meaning the people, who, we implied, didn't. Now I'...
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Obscurely disappointed, as we sometimes are when the things we profess to dislike don't happen, she looked up abruptly and smiled at him.
Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare’s ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we...
No, Keeks - this is a good thing. It's been hell - I know it has. But I don't want to be without... us. You;re the person I - you're my life, Keeks. You have been and you will be and you are. i don't...
No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the...
No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be...
My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.
Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.
Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we’d all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the s...
Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul.
Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.
It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could put it over.
In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in p...
In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis phy...
In America we are perhaps more accustomed to art that enacts the boredom of life with a side order of that (by now) overfamiliar Warholian nihilism.
IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR! Welcome to the twentieth century. It’s not fair. It’s never fair.
I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.
I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.
I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.