Top 30 Andrew OHagan Quotes

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

The characters in ‘Be Near Me’ come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.

There’s a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be ‘likeable’ or ‘sympathetic’. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?

Interviewing is not a democratic art.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

You’ll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity.

I was 10 when I realised I couldn’t stand football. I’d tried, obviously, before this – no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring – and where the sea might deposit you – until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

I wasn’t like other boys. At any rate, I wasn’t like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.

I’ve been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.

When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn’t quite there before.

When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one’s living room as much as in one’s local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children’s literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.

Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism – Barack Obama’s victory is a manifestation not of Washington’s need for change, but of America’s. That is not how democracy works in England.

High culture isn’t what it used to be.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time – sometimes time out from their realist fixations – to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive – no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don’t require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.

Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they’d like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.