Charles Finch Quotes

The hardest part of losing a person, Charles, is that grief is only an absence. There is nowhere to go to touch it.

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was ... There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library
it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.

If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.

The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank ... The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.

Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It's definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.

For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There's no page of prose in existence that its author can't improve after it's been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I'm amazed I ever struggled with them.

Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?

Once in a while dancing is immaculate, a perfection: you understand why raves exist: when you've timed the drinks correctly and they lift your mood and your energy, the songs are ones you all know, and you look around at the girls, their happy lost faces, their beautiful bare stomachs, their jangly long earrings, something limbic, their skin just damp with sweat to the touch, the whole thing ...

It had been a perfect nap
the sort a man runs into now and again by chance ...

And as I gazed up at the implacable black of the sky, my body warm from the bed but my face chilled, I thought of the terrible truth we all know, somewhere in our souls: that there has never been a shred of evidence that life goes beyond life. Nobody has sent back word. There is nothing. That does not mean there is nothing. But there is nothing.

There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

There's more mystical nonsense written about the process of writing than almost anything. Inspiration, genius, "the muse." So I want to lay out one huge, comforting, wonderful fact: the more you write, the better you get at it. Writing is like a forehand or driving a car or playing guitar. Practice makes you better.

That's not to say inspiration and genius don't exist. Not everyone can become Tolstoy through hard work. What it means is that, wherever you start, you can improve. And the way to do it is to write a lot.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that I've published eight books. When I flip through the first one now, I can't believe it ever made it onto shelves. I see so many flaws and problems in it that I'm amazed. The reason is that I've written hundreds of thousands of words between since then. As long as you produce a little something every day, every week, in time, invisibly, you'll get better. Trailing behind every successful writer are a million words that never saw the light of day. Sometimes it takes five million words. The most important piece of writing advice anyone can give or get is simple, and therefore can seem uninteresting, but it's true: just keep writing.

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city ...

The two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat ...

I guess the lesson is you can't go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.

What fools American can be for England

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

then, why he saw so much of Leigh, and

He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.