Elliot Perlman Quotes

#1. Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality. I might have a Scotch to keep me going, but I like to be as awake and as alert as possible.

Elliot Perlman

#2. You would love the way he sees you. He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did

Elliot Perlman

#3. The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.

Elliot Perlman

#4. Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused

Elliot Perlman

#5. Charisma will sustain a relationship only in the way that strong coffee first thing in the morning will sustain a career.

Elliot Perlman

#6. As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

Elliot Perlman

#7. I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.

Elliot Perlman

#8. I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

Elliot Perlman

#9. I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.

Elliot Perlman

#10. Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

Elliot Perlman

#11. The reason his father has no time for poetry is that he is afraid of the messiness of life. Poetry feeds on all that spills over the boundaries of the usual things, the everyday things with which most people are obsessed, so William has no time for it.

Elliot Perlman

#12. We too often laughed at the same time to be a whore and a lonely guy.

Elliot Perlman

#13. I know that at literary festivals I'm speaking mostly to middle-class women, who frequently vote in a way that is contrary to how I'd like them to vote.

Elliot Perlman

#14. Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.

Elliot Perlman

#15. After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

Elliot Perlman

#16. He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others

Elliot Perlman

#17. Simon and I by then were practicing to be apart, rehearsing together in the same room and often in the same conversation.

Elliot Perlman

#18. [Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

Elliot Perlman

#19. What is it about men that make women so lonely?

Elliot Perlman

#20. Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.

Elliot Perlman

#21. You were trying to tell me something and I was trying to tell you something else. We didn't trust each other and that was reason enough to make each of us right.

Elliot Perlman

#22. The peculiar striations that define someone's personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.

Elliot Perlman

#23. [T]he best historians ... take a thorough knowledge of the evidence of their subject and combine it with a sharp intellect, the warmest understanding of people and the highest imaginative powers.

Elliot Perlman

#24. I hold him to my chest. My love for him is the only unequivocally good thing I know is always there inside of me. It is the reason I should be spared all that is coming, the only reason.

Elliot Perlman

#25. In my work, I'm always trying not to put barriers up between the 'good poor' and the 'bad poor.' I'm not sure my work will change things much, but at the very least, you want to make people feel that they are not alone.

Elliot Perlman

#26. What else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?

Elliot Perlman

#27. I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.

Elliot Perlman

#28. You know you're in love with somebody when you wake up next to them, comfortable despite your breath smelling like the week-old water at the bottom of a vase, when you are terribly excited to see them, to talk to them again, having missed them after all that sleep.

Elliot Perlman

#29. When you're younger, you tend to be reckless about trying to find out who you are and what you can do and should do. But as you get older you become more accepting of yourself, and with that comes greater contentment.

Elliot Perlman