Quotes from Charles Palliser

Living with my grandmother in Bath, I sort of thought I was living in the 19th century. My grandmother was someone who, in a way, was rather defiantly trying to live a pre-World War I existence.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

I'm quite intrigued by the notion of a book that is completely self-contained but related to another book. I've coined a rather hideous word for it - a paraquel.

In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

To exist is to be betrayed, since we exist for others only by virtue of what we betray of ourselves to them.

I said: I don't ever find people uninteresting. On the contrary, I find them so fascinating and so highly-flavoured that after small helpings, I have to go away and chew them slowly and analyse the taste of them.

Such people are their own punishment.

When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of your own worth, and if that person throws you aside, you believe profoundly and utterly that it is because you are worthless. That is a kind of death.

I saw an infinity of such dreary evenings stretching out ahead of me. Trapped in a dirty old house with a grieving old woman and an irritable young one. And with only the books I had brought with me, most of which were still in my trunk anyway.

If his nose were a tail he would be the perfect image of a sow's rear end.

The greatest actors can create a human being before the very eyes of spectators – not show them something beforehand like a puppet. To go out onto the stage and become the character at a moment of crisis and speak without knowing what you are going to say until the words come out! To court that danger and to triumph, that is the great adventure that life offers. The incomparable adventure. Don't you see that?

We only value ourselves as others value us, for it might be said that we hold ourselves in trust for others.

Happiness ... is much more than merely the absence of misery.

One sees more clearly in the fog because one has to look harder.

Some people have a talent for being happy and others appear to find unhappiness almost as if they sought it.

To think of what he must have done to have inflicted so much damage /.../. It was hard to believe. It was hard to believe anything good about out species. Was this what we were - cruel apes who wore clothes and washed and perfumed our bodies?

When a crime is investigated, the explanation that is adopted is not the one that best accounts for all the circumstances, but the one that best serves the purposes of those carrying out the investigation.

There are people who invite betrayal. They are demanding towards themselves and don't realize how hard they are on other people. They make it difficult for others not to fail them. And in some cases they even take a grim pleasure from being let down.

Yes, Jonnie," Emma said. "Extraordinary as it seems, it was mere coincidence that brought you to our door. It's the sort of thing that you expect to find only in a novel — and only when you know the author has been too idle to work it out any better.

We don't exist in and for ourselves but only in as much as we are re-created in the imagination of another person— by entering that person's life as fully as possible. I mean, entering it imaginatively, intellectually, physically and emotionally with all the conflicts that that makes inevitable.

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.