Edward St Aubyn

“The best way to contradict him is to let him talk”

— Edward St Aubyn

“Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about”

— Edward St Aubyn

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

— Edward St Aubyn

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

— Edward St Aubyn

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

— Edward St Aubyn

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

— Edward St Aubyn

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

— Edward St Aubyn

“She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I…

— Edward St Aubyn

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that…

— Edward St Aubyn

The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York…

— Edward St Aubyn

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

— Edward St Aubyn

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

— Edward St Aubyn

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created…

— Edward St Aubyn

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they…

— Edward St Aubyn

The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either.…

— Edward St Aubyn

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're…

— Edward St Aubyn

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of…

— Edward St Aubyn

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at…

— Edward St Aubyn

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had…

— Edward St Aubyn

“The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of…

— Edward St Aubyn

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

— Edward St Aubyn

The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary…

— Edward St Aubyn

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

— Edward St Aubyn

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

— Edward St Aubyn