I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it.… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
The orchid's association in Chinese culture with such virtues as elegance, good taste, friendship, and fertility goes all the way back to Confucius himself, who was said to have a particular attachment to the flowers. — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
There's a distinct unease about Americans when they are outside the United States. I can't say quite what it is, but they are easily… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
'The Odyssey' is a great poem to refugee-dom... Odysseus is not entirely a refugee... he's somebody who's blown off course. The entire book is… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
I'll wager there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn't need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
Bangkok is infamously mired in lurid contradiction, but it's also a city of subtle and distorted moods that journalism and film have hitherto mostly… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
Mongolians are epic drinkers and carousers, and in this respect, they are extremely congenial to my own way of thinking. — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had… — Lawrence Osborne Copy Share Image
