Edward St. Aubyn Quotes

In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.

I find everything boring, therefore I'm fascinating.

If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, "Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!

We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

The mess that's emerging ... at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes further object of contemplation, and that this rhythm of delusion and revelation feels as if it's essential to the nature of consciousness considering itself.

The best way to contradict him is to let him talk

There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it ...

Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn't know how she'd cope without Buckingham Palace,' Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porlock.

How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

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.

Either I wake up in the Grey Zone,' he whispered, 'and I've forgotten how to breathe, and my feet are so far away I'm not sure I can afford the air fare;

His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.

At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They're sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one's persecutors. I don't suppose that forgiveness was uppermost in the minds of people who were being nailed to a cross until Jesus, if not the first man with a Christ complex still the most successful, wafted onto the scene. Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.

In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.

Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.

Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth. - Some Hope

He couldn't help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and day-dreaming. These characteristics didn't seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity.

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is.

Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn't all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn't have been the real thing.

Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.

As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place,

She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral,

No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that "least mediocre of the mediocre" is a discouraging title for a prize[.]

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 in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now.

the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train ...

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 in telling the truth.

The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.

She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.

Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that's all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death.

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 right.

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 control over.

Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off.

Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp,' said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

Made him more conscious of how little experience he had of saying what he meant.

Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.

It was unbelievable, there was the dry-cleaning ticket again. There must be more than one.

I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,' said Patrick. 'The rest is packaging.

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. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

Talking of 'letting go of a lot of stuff,'" his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else's used handkerchief....

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?

An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?

People think they are individuals because they use the word "I" so often, Patrick commented.

Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle.

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.

Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.

In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down.

Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence.

Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...

I feel on the verge of a great transformation, which may be as simple as becoming interested in other things.

There could be no real dialogue between those who still thought that time was on their side and those who realized that they were dangling from its jaws, like Saturn's children, already half-devoured.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

If you were madly in love, you'd want me to win,' said Katherine.

"'I'm not sure that's true,' said Sam. 'I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else's egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.'

"'Oh,' said Katherine, 'you mean you're not going to enable my egoism.'

"'Okay, okay,' said Sam 'you're right – love is doing everything you want all the time.

Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.