Ned Beauman Quotes

What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless.

A tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

Loeser's favourite book in Blimk's shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the notion that it was possible to seduce a woman just by following a rigorous system of instructions. The problem was, there wasn't much in it that he felt he could put to practical use. 'Want to impress a dame with morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she's still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That's one of every type of egg on a tray: a soft-boiled egg, a hard-boiled egg, an egg over easy, an egg sunny side up, a poached egg, a devilled egg, a pickled egg, a coddled egg, a scrambled egg, a one-egg omelette, and a shot of egg nog for the hangover. No dame will be able to believe you know so many ways to cook eggs. Egg protein is good for the manly function, and after you've pulled off the Egg Majestique, you'll probably need it, if you know what I mean.' This sounded pretty authoritative to Loeser but he just wasn't quite sure.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

You couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate almost everything.

He realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine ... Perhaps if he got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing.

The Nazis, he had written in his latest, are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal relationship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don't assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology.

What does it do?" said Loeser.
"You feel as if you're being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it's as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to he replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can't really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down." Hildkraut smiled wistfully. "It's fantastic." At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. "And it makes Wagner sound really good.

Loeser found it hard to believe that God was forever slapping the face of the universe like a policeman trying to stop a drunk from falling asleep.

A portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father's ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you'd never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.