Philip Sington Quotes

#1. But then, he calls many things mad that he does not care for. Perhaps that is easier than accepting them.

Philip Sington

#2. One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

Philip Sington

#3. One of the joys of being in love is that it clarifies your priorities. Complication arises from not knowing what you want.

Philip Sington

#4. The future can always wait so long as the here-and-now is rapturous.

Philip Sington

#5. For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).

Philip Sington

#6. He reached into the grate, picked out a couple of scraps, smoothed them out, leaning close to the flickering light. He was curious to see what it was Zoia had decided to destroy.

Philip Sington

#7. We drank our coffee the Russian way. That is to say we had vodka before it and vodka afterwards.

Philip Sington

#8. To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

Philip Sington

#9. I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

Philip Sington

#10. The wind funnelled down the covered platform, jostling the passengers and tearing at their clothes. A woman's scarf whipped by overhead, somersaulting as if intoxicated by the sudden taste of freedom.

Philip Sington

#11. I wanted her body and soul, but body first.

Philip Sington

#12. Her hair, just long enough now to tie back in a knot, had a coppery sheen, a hint of fire in the darkness.

Philip Sington

#13. That was the dream of Montparnasse: to live for the moments of the greatest intensity, to find in them a truthful inspiration, and to hell with all the rest.

Philip Sington

#14. Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.

Philip Sington

#15. Problems are there to be solved. How dull life would be without them.

Philip Sington

#16. The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.

Philip Sington

#17. I was already at an age when putting off anything was a bad idea.

Philip Sington