Olivia Laing

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

— Olivia Laing

“There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal.”

— 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…

— Olivia Laing

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

— 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,…

— 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…

— Olivia Laing

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

— 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…

— 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,…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Olivia Laing

“(‘we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel’).”

— Olivia Laing

“If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and…

— Olivia Laing

“Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.’ 18”

— Olivia Laing

“At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their…

— Olivia Laing

“It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply…

— Olivia Laing

“Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any…

— Olivia Laing

“Outside the window, people threw dinner parties.”

— Olivia Laing

“I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I…

— Olivia Laing

“People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They…

— Olivia Laing