Edward St. Aubyn Quotes

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

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.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

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.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

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.

The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

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.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.

There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it....