MY SELF Quotes
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.
There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.
I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.
The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.
By choosing recovery and risking to be real, we set the healthy boundaries that say, "I am in charge of my recovery and my life, and no one else on this Earth is.
I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.
I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.
Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.
I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Owning a dog is slightly less expensive than being addicted to crack.
The Presence of the demon keeps the chakra from doing its job, but that challenge also forces us to bring more awareness to that job, so eventually we can do it better.
It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
People pleasing doesn't allow you to receive.
The more choices we have, the greater the need for focus.
Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.
GREAT SECRET Whenever I’m learning something difficult, I keep expectations low, and aspirations high.
There is a self-love solution for every challenge.
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.
The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!
Many of my works fall into the category of "Zeitgeist novels." Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
