Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.
From Julian Barnes
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
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