Top 59 Andrew O'hagan Quotes
#1. In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.
#2. Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.
#3. Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
#4. When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
#5. When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.
#6. As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.
#7. You'll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity.
#8. But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.
#9. A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.
#10. 'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.
#11. We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.
#12. Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.
#13. The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.
#14. Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.
#15. Being thy servant, O Mary, is a surety of salvation God grants solely to those He will save.
#16. We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.
#17. Be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.
#18. Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek: I'll stay a month longer. I am a fellow o' the strangest mind i' the world; I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether (He's an oddity in that he enjoys having fun)
#19. Stengel admitted. "I'm not going to make any decision until I have to give the umpire my batting order. Then you'll know as well as I." The next afternoon, Casey resisted
#20. Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they'd like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.
#21. Your soul is a pure, white light in a dark world. It will take a thousand worse sins to taint it."
Andrew turned to him. "What sins would those be?"
Rory grinned, slowly, devilishly. "Give me food, first, for strength, and I will show you.
#22. A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
#23. It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.
#24. I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.
#25. I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
#26. Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...
#27. Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
#28. There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?
#29. I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.
#30. If there was ever a president who could be called our Charlie Browniest, it would be Andrew Johnson.
#31. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
#32. Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England.
#33. I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
#34. O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
#35. I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.
#36. Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
#37. one. Children of God! it is thus Jesus would have us to pray to the Father in heaven. O let His Name, and Kingdom, and Will, have the first place in our love;
#38. You're just America-on-ice.
#39. The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia.
#40. Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.
#41. Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
#42. I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.
#43. High culture isn't what it used to be.
#44. Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts - works just as good for a 'N.Y. Times' op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.
#45. Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.
#46. Interviewing is not a democratic art.
#47. You're doing great,' she said. 'You're in Birmingham .' Scullion wanted to say this was a contradiction in terms but he couldn't speak.
#48. When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
#49. A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
#50. When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.
#51. The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.
#52. As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.
#53. Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
#54. Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.
#55. I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I've ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it.
#56. We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
#57. It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies ... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.
#58. The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.
#59. I always knew I would come to London. I loved Glasgow, but it seemed filled with echoes of my parents' lives, and sometimes you just want a city of your own.
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