Edward St Aubyn quotes

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it? (Edward St Aubyn)
Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
You can only give things up once they start to let you down. (Edward St Aubyn)
It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the nightmare of endless experience. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them? View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The tragedy of old age, when a man's too weak to hit his own child. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn't carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom? (Edward St Aubyn)
Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars? View quote
Edward St Aubyn