Ned Beauman Quotes

#1. I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

Ned Beauman

#2. I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.

Ned Beauman

#3. Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing.

Ned Beauman

#4. Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox.

Ned Beauman

#5. You couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate almost everything.

Ned Beauman

#6. A tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

Ned Beauman

#7. What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless.

Ned Beauman

#8. The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

Ned Beauman

#9. I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

Ned Beauman

#10. I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

Ned Beauman

#11. You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little
darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.

Ned Beauman

#12. I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.

Ned Beauman

#13. I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.

Ned Beauman

#14. She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.

Ned Beauman

#15. A portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.

Ned Beauman

#16. Loeser found it hard to believe that God was forever slapping the face of the universe like a policeman trying to stop a drunk from falling asleep.

Ned Beauman

#17. Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

Ned Beauman

#18. If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

Ned Beauman

#19. I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

Ned Beauman

#20. accidents, like women, allude

Ned Beauman

#21. There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.

Ned Beauman

#22. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

Ned Beauman

#23. I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

Ned Beauman

#24. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon.

Ned Beauman

#25. Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

Ned Beauman