Andrew O'Hagan quotes

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality. (Andrew O'Hagan)

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

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

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. (Andrew O'Hagan)

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.

Andrew O'Hagan

Interviewing is not a democratic art.

Andrew O'Hagan

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

Andrew O'Hagan

Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.

Andrew O'Hagan

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Andrew O'Hagan

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

Andrew O'Hagan

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.

Andrew O'Hagan