The Reading Room

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”

“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

“Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

“Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.”

“Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?”

“Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”

“What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”

“Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.”

“Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?”

“What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.”

“Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.”

“He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.”

“Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.”

“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”

“In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.”

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”

“I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.”

“It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.”

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”

“I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!”

“Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - than love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.”

“The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.”

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”

“This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...”

“Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.”

“When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.”

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”

“He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.”

“You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?”

“Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.”

“To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.”

“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”

“I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.”

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

“As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.”

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”

“In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.”

“It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.”

“[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.”

“What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? “As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?”

“They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.”

“They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. Margaret’s”

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”