“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”

It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy.

The squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.

In terms of the sort of class, and the sort of snobby, slightly on the back-foot thing Britain has. But it’s much more prevalent in America.

How many more children have to die before this country realizes that No Gun Zones create perfect locations for violence?

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

When you’re a regular on a TV show, they give you more of a backstory, so with these recurring gigs, you have to make up your own backstory.

A man obsessed: obsessed with perfection, sharing, aesthetics, taste, savoir-faire, and much more.

John Moncur has been much more effective since he came on

If I can’t get the girl, at least give me more money.