There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this…

“Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on…

— Olivia Laing

“they’d even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young”

— Olivia Laing

“The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed…

— Olivia Laing

“The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden…

— Olivia Laing

“But already this isn't quite right. The first apartment I had wasn't on the island at all. It was in Brooklyn Heights, a few…

— Olivia Laing

“Loneliness is a very special place. It isn’t always easy to see the truth of Wilson’s statement, but over the course of my travels…

— Olivia Laing

“When he changed his mind, very suddenly, expressing increasingly grave reservations into a series of hotel phones, I found myself adrift, stunned by the…

— Olivia Laing

“I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”

— Olivia Laing

“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame…

— Olivia Laing

“Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains.”

— Olivia Laing

“As long as Frank was well, I was happy,’ he wrote in Memoirs. ‘He had a gift for creating a life and, when he…

— Olivia Laing

“If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant's wail: I don't want to be…

— Olivia Laing

“Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity…

— Olivia Laing

“I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back…

— Olivia Laing

“seemed to me that this second act of Darger’s life compounded the isolation of the first; divesting him of dignity and drowning out or…

— Olivia Laing