Quotes About Aubyn

#1. Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.

Edward St. Aubyn

#2. the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train ...

Edward St. Aubyn

#3. All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David's excuse, she wondered.

Edward St. Aubyn

#4. It was unbelievable, there was the dry-cleaning ticket again. There must be more than one.

Edward St. Aubyn

#5. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the nightmare of endless experience.

Edward St. Aubyn

#6. I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

Edward St. Aubyn

#7. At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.

Edward St. Aubyn

#8. Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

Edward St. Aubyn

#9. The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.

Edward St. Aubyn

#10. Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

Edward St. Aubyn

#11. I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

Edward St. Aubyn

#12. After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

Edward St. Aubyn

#13. Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.

Edward St. Aubyn

#14. Nevertheless, she treasured the idea that the Fauberts were connected to the earth in some wholesome way that the rest of us had forgotten.

Edward St. Aubyn

#15. Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

Edward St. Aubyn

#16. The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

Edward St. Aubyn

#17. Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about

Edward St. Aubyn

#18. An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

Edward St. Aubyn

#19. Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp,' said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.

Edward St. Aubyn

#20. Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.

Edward St. Aubyn

#21. People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Edward St. Aubyn

#22. Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that's all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death.

Edward St. Aubyn

#23. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

Edward St. Aubyn

#24. The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn't know how she'd cope without Buckingham Palace,' Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porlock.

Edward St. Aubyn

#25. Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence.

Edward St. Aubyn

#26. If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

Edward St. Aubyn

#27. Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth. - Some Hope

Edward St. Aubyn

#28. The best way to contradict him is to let him talk

Edward St. Aubyn

#29. That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.

Edward St. Aubyn

#30. His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

Edward St. Aubyn

#31. It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

Edward St. Aubyn

#32. What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?

Edward St. Aubyn

#33. But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn't all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn't have been the real thing.

Edward St. Aubyn

#34. She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.

Edward St. Aubyn

#35. Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.

Edward St. Aubyn

#36. An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?

Edward St. Aubyn

#37. There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it ...

Edward St. Aubyn

#38. She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral,

Edward St. Aubyn

#39. Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off.

Edward St. Aubyn

#40. Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

Edward St. Aubyn

#41. They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don't need to promise.

Edward St. Aubyn

#42. In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down.

Edward St. Aubyn

#43. I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

Edward St. Aubyn

#44. I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.

Edward St. Aubyn

#45. If a woman could win love with her body, the world would have no bastards.

Meredith Duran

#46. Made him more conscious of how little experience he had of saying what he meant.

Edward St. Aubyn

#47. No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Edward St. Aubyn

#48. With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker.

Edward St. Aubyn

#49. Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

Edward St. Aubyn

#50. I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,' said Patrick. 'The rest is packaging.

Edward St. Aubyn

#51. Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

Edward St. Aubyn

#52. You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

Edward St. Aubyn

#53. Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

Edward St. Aubyn

#54. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

Edward St. Aubyn

#55. She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.

Edward St. Aubyn

#56. How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.

Edward St. Aubyn

#57. The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.

Edward St. Aubyn

#58. We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

Edward St. Aubyn

#59. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.

Edward St. Aubyn

#60. The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Edward St. Aubyn

#61. In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.

Edward St. Aubyn

#62. Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle.

Edward St. Aubyn

#63. Try as one might to live on the edge, thought Patrick, getting into the other lift, there was no point in competing with people who believed what they saw on television.

Edward St. Aubyn

#64. There could be no real dialogue between those who still thought that time was on their side and those who realized that they were dangling from its jaws, like Saturn's children, already half-devoured.

Edward St. Aubyn

#65. People think they are individuals because they use the word "I" so often, Patrick commented.

Edward St. Aubyn

#66. It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

Edward St. Aubyn

#67. As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?

Edward St. Aubyn

#68. It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place,

Edward St. Aubyn

#69. Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

Edward St. Aubyn

#70. Ninety per cent of the drugs were for him and ten per cent for Natasha, a woman who remained an impenetrable mystery to him during the six months they lived together. The only thing he felt certain about was that she irritated him; but then, who didn't?

Edward St. Aubyn

#71. The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.

Edward St. Aubyn

#72. The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.

Edward St. Aubyn

#73. Either I wake up in the Grey Zone,' he whispered, 'and I've forgotten how to breathe, and my feet are so far away I'm not sure I can afford the air fare;

Edward St. Aubyn

#74. He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly.

Edward St. Aubyn

#75. Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.

Edward St. Aubyn

#76. Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.

Edward St. Aubyn

#77. Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.

Edward St. Aubyn

#78. In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

Edward St. Aubyn

#79. Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Edward St. Aubyn

#80. He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is.

Edward St. Aubyn

#81. And my heart is a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For into a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street,' something, something, 'enough to drive one mad.

Edward St. Aubyn

#82. Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

Edward St. Aubyn

#83. I feel on the verge of a great transformation, which may be as simple as becoming interested in other things.

Edward St. Aubyn