Edward St Aubyn Quotes

19 quotes in 310 categories

• Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones…
• It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be…
• Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be…
• Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.
• I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?
• I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.
• It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
• The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.
• The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.
• The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.
• Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no…
• I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends.…
• I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.
• Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact,…
• The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power…
• People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.
• Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.
• Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
• No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

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