Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
Looking back, I realise it wasn’t only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn’t knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn’t they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?
Sometimes it’s best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
You don’t have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped.
I always, always wanted to be a writer.
The ‘Reader’s Digest’ used to run a feature called ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ The new wisdom – post-Trump and Brexit – is that it doesn’t.
Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that’s new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world – block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.
‘Family Guy’. It’s not only the funniest programme on television, it’s the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.
I should have conceived the idea for ‘The Mighty Walzer’ earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player – shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that.
I’ve always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.
We shouldn’t be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
You don’t divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator.
If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.
You don’t remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.
Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.
If it’s bathos you want – and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end – nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it’s playing sport.
Even the wordiest of men know there’s a time to button it.
The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don’t have Italian tailors we can spare here.
Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I’d vandalised and now limit myself to ‘Good wishes.’
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you’d just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding ‘Keep smiling – Fyodor.’
The magic word ‘Shakespeare’ always freezes you in your chair.
I wouldn’t dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf – which aren’t truly sports anyway.
I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line – it’s George Eliot, it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.
Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn’t writing what I believed. I’m not interested in what I believe.
No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.
Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.
What isn’t for everybody shouldn’t be for anybody: the world’s opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
There’s a lot to be said for misanthropy.
Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it’s literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What’s at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.
To my ear, the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.
As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It’s important to get your operas right.
The day I don’t attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of his appearance – someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal.
Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don’t recognise, an attitude that doesn’t accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don’t get or of which they don’t approve.
I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.
I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.
I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish – the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn’t go to synagogue. I’m frightened of synagogue to this day.
‘Legality’ is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.
The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I’ve been trying hard to follow ever since.
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.
The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.
If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone.
Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn’t a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.
Rereading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print – ‘The Very Model of a Man’ is the only novel of mine that has – and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.
You can imprison but you can’t enslave a man who argues with his books.
Maybe we’d forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we’ve been reminded. They’re meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn.
I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I’ve never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.
Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up ‘Steppenwolf,’ and you’ll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you’ll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you’ll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.
In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.
It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.
Let’s be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn’t even concur with that exception.
One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.
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