Alan Quotes

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.

Ive learned never to try and force words to come.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read Boneland.

... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it's funny in any language.

I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

Reverse Darwinism: survival of the most idiotic.

It hurts! It throbs with pain, the like of which I never felt the half! Mortal flesh would scream again . . . yet demon spirit bids to laugh

Demons don't play by the rules. They lie and they cheat and they stab in the back.

I only want to sleep . . . and never wake.

I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.

Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn't work out well last time. Let's not make that mistake again.

They care about their club, and that's why they always have something good to say, even when it is negative

As a parish priest of the Church Of England I promise to look after everyone in the community, not just those who come to church, not just white people, not just the Christians.

I don't know where this Arctic wind has come from but it's freezing!

Ziege hits it high for Heskey who isn't playing

It was the game that put the Everton ship back on the road.

John Arne Riise was deservedly blown up for that foul

John Moncur has been much more effective since he came on

Tugay is writhing around all over the place as if he were dead

Well, he had two stabs at the cherry

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.

I think what we're really bad at doing is recognising that it is possible to have lost of different views within the church.

I've never really separated out the spiritual and the secular.

This will be their 19th consecutive game without a win unless they can get an equaliser.

A few question marks are being asked in the Honduran defence

Xavier, who looks just like Zeus, not that I have any idea what Zeus looks like.

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.