Words matter. These are the best Lawrence Osborne Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In Bangkok’s budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre.
The best times to visit the Gobi and Three Camel Lodge are June, and September through October. By the beginning of November, it is ferociously cold, while October can swing surreally between warm days and clear, chilly nights and frosty mornings dusted with snow – perfect.
The orchid’s association in Chinese culture with such virtues as elegance, good taste, friendship, and fertility goes all the way back to Confucius himself, who was said to have a particular attachment to the flowers.
I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young – my wife was from there – and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.
There’s a distinct unease about Americans when they are outside the United States. I can’t say quite what it is, but they are easily spooked or driven to cynicism – the country is diverse but, paradoxically, extremely insular.
Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it. Those people, like novelists, who can no longer enjoy this status are condemned to despise it.
Studies in the emerging field of cellular bioenergetics, a branch of biochemistry concerned with how energy flows through living systems, suggest that molecules from orchids might be able to repair decaying mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, in humans.
I love the novel as a form, as an adventure of mind and soul. Really, I absolutely love writing them; they consume my days and nights – what can I say? But I am an avid film student, too: I watch a movie every night.
I’ve got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don’t really care. I think we love villains… precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don’t think nice characters do.
I read Gide’s ‘The Immoralist’ over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It’s written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.
Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature – for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it.
My favorite whisky bar in the world is in my adopted Bangkok. A refined and secretive Japanese speakeasy among the girly bars of Soi 33, it’s called Hailiang.
I still miss qualities of Khmer life that are hard to quantify: the slow, sensual pace, the hovering presence of the past, the vast skies filled with terrifying and beautiful butts. And, of course, the food.
Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It’s a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.
Arak means ‘sweat’ in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion.
Muslims do drink, as anyone who has spent a wild weekend with Saudi booze tourists in Bahrain will know. Those Saudi tourists are like teenage girls in Manchester on a Saturday night. But each country and region is different.
The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity.
More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, ‘Ink Orchid.’ And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called ‘Orchid and Orange.’
One of the reasons I like living in Bangkok is that, although it’s a megacity, it’s very saturated with nature – the vast and brooding skies, the sudden storms and rains, the vegetation and even the animals that abound.
I’ll wager there isn’t a human being on earth who doesn’t believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck – and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both.
Shoes tell you a lot about someone. Think of ‘Strangers on a Train.’ The first thing we see are Bruno’s shoes. We know right away that something is up.
I grew up in the small town of Haywards Heath, south of London.
My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read ‘Reader’s Digest’, listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.