At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
I usually write on a computer - unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that's common among writers if they get cornered on something.
I've only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.
This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.
I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.
Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.
She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.
…surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.
…and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
Being a decent human being will require effort and energy.
We're not ourselves, are we? I'm certainly not myself, not anymore. And you're not either. You don't seem yourself. Not as I remember you.
She shouldn't speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.
If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?
Maybe we've grown out of each other.
These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.
I tell you what it is. It's...when I didn't see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day in some way or another -" "Same here -" "- even if it was just 'I wish Dexter could see this' or 'where's Dexter now?' or 'Christ, that Dexter, what an idiot', you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I'd got you back - my best friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby - I'm so happy for you, Dex. But it feels like I've lost you again.
but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.
She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.
Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?
What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?
The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.
I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.
Sometimes I wish that I hadn't learned how to crochet," I say, and Alice laughs. Obviously she thinks I'm joking, which is maybe for the best.
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