Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

26 quotes in 568 categories

• We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.
• Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.
• My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people…
• Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.
• The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.
• The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs,…
• A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
• Interviewing is not a democratic art.
• Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but…
• Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to…
• Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live…
• I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical,…
• Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in…
• A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with…
• I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office…
• We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but…
• The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other…
• When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing…
• When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves…
• As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

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