Top 100 O'hagan Quotes
#1. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#2. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#3. The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.
Andrew O'Hagan
#4. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#5. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#6. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#7. Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.
Andrew O'Hagan
#8. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#9. As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.
Andrew O'Hagan
#10. The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.
Andrew O'Hagan
#11. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#12. A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
Andrew O'Hagan
#13. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#14. We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.
Andrew O'Hagan
#15. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#16. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#17. Every time someone opens a book and begins to read, a synergy between the reader and the writer occurs across time and space.
Jeanette O'Hagan
#19. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#20. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#21. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#22. The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia.
Andrew O'Hagan
#24. Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
Andrew O'Hagan
#25. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#26. The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.
Andrew O'Hagan
#27. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#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?
Andrew O'Hagan
#29. Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
Andrew O'Hagan
#30. Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...
Andrew O'Hagan
#31. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#32. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#33. It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.
Andrew O'Hagan
#34. A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
Andrew O'Hagan
#35. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#36. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#37. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#38. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#39. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#40. Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.
Andrew O'Hagan
#41. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#42. 'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.
Andrew O'Hagan
#43. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#44. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#45. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#46. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#47. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#48. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#49. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#50. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#51. Even though it was six o'clock, there was no sense of approaching dawn.
Mary Higgins Clark
#52. When I concentrate and focus, they always go in, so I'm gonna continue to do that, and they will go in.
Shaquille O'Neal
#54. Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king?
William Shakespeare
#55. Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
Tim O'Brien
#56. I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.
Kate O'Mara
#57. The spark lies within us, somewhere deep within! Once you find it, that will illuminate the whole path you travel, all lives upon your way and the very purpose of your life. O beloved, know this world is illuminated by people so!
Preeth Nambiar
#58. The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn, and violets bathe in the wet o' the morn.
Robert Burns
#59. The body consists of three parts: the brainium, the borax and the abominable cavity. The brainium contains the brain. The borax contains the heart and lungs and the abominable cavity contains the bowels of which there are five: a, e, i, o, u.
Tom Magliozzi
#60. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Flannery O'Connor
#61. PSA98.1 O sing unto the LORD a new song; for he hath done marvellous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory. PSA98.2 The LORD hath made known his salvation: his righteousness hath he openly shewed in the sight of the heathen.
Anonymous
#62. Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep.
John O'Hara
#63. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!
Jack O'Brien
#64. Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh
Flannery O'Connor
#65. I never understood who all those people are behind the actors! When you see them on the red carpet on TV, you go, 'Why does that person need such a large entourage?' And then you realize that every single person there has a role to play.
Lupita Nyong'o
#66. At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Rudyard Kipling
#67. Ank froze. The moaning became more stressful and a little bit louder. "I think its coming from the basement."
Without warning, Ank grabs a pool stick and starts banging on the floorboards. "Would you shut up! It four o'clock in the morning and people are trying to get their beauty sleep!
Khalia Hades
#69. A life that was surprisingly full, even though it was simple. Or maybe because it was simple.
Carlene O'Connor
#70. Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances
Diana Wynne Jones
#71. Behind me, Ingrid made a sort of muffled snorting sound. I can only assume she was choking on a breath mint. I shot her a look, hoping she hadn't heard anything, and saw she was wearing a poker face, which could only mean she'd heard everything.
Daniel O'Malley
#73. OUT OF AN INFINITE LOVE, you, O Lord, have made me an heir of your kingdom and joint heir with Christ. O Good Jesus, to whom else shall I go? You have the words of eternal life. I hope, and I believe in you. Lord keep me from despair. Amen. O
Derek A. Olsen
#74. Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. I've always heard that women secretly want their father. So I used to walk around in a 1950s business suit, with a hat and a pipe. My opening line would be, 'You should be getting to bed now.'
Conan O'Brien
#77. 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.
Andrew O'Hagan
#79. On the question - which is more important for a story-plot or character. "It's a bit like asking whether your need your left or right leg. Maybe you have a preference, maybe one is stronger (for you) but really, you need both." (on Facebook)
Jeanette O'Hagan
#80. There are things we can't change, and we just have to accept that. And maybe that's some kind of grace
Bryan Lee O'Malley
#82. Don't let a three-o'clock-at-night feeling fog your soul.
L.M. Montgomery
#83. That's my feeling - that real God and religion are two different things and that religion is trying to obscure what God really is.
Sinead O'Connor
#84. Well, it's a little odd, the path I took, because when I was young, I wanted to be a cattle rancher. That was what I knew and that was what I liked.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#85. I'm the C.E.O., nominated by the shareholders. If they're not happy, I have to take the consequences.
Carlos Ghosn
#86. When it comes to making the right moves at the right time, your dance partner is life itself or what can be referred to as your destiny. The more you pay attention and practice intuitive decision making skills, the better you will become at sensing the unique rhythm of your life.
Paul O'Brien
#88. I'd be the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in a hospital to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an order!
Joseph Heller
#89. I like a Blackpool breakfast, me - 20 ciggies and a pot of tea.
Paul O'Grady
#90. If I don't get five [titles], I won't be happy with myself as a basketball player. I don't know how you guys will feel about me.
Shaquille O'Neal
#91. Change without learning is painful. Learning without change is pointless.
Graham O'Connell
#93. Celestials is a soapy space opera. Perhaps a spacey soap opera.
M.C. O'Neill
#94. We're not aware of fame itself, we're not that kind of band.
Ed O'Brien
#95. O sinner, be not discouraged, but have recourse to Mary in all you necessities. Call her to your assistance, for such is the divine Will that she should help in every kind of necessity.
Saint Basil
#96. Seek to share joy with others, or to make somebody else happy, and you will find your own soul radiant with the joy you wished for another.
David O. McKay
#97. But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.
Timothy O'Grady
#98. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.
Flannery O'Connor
#99. For false christs and false prophets will arise and o perform signs and wonders, p to lead astray, if possible, q the elect. 23But r be on guard; s I have told you all things beforehand.
Anonymous
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