Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

We all have names we don't know about.

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.

Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.

I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.