Quotes from Andrew O'Hagan

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

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.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

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.

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?

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

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.

The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.

Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...

The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate. We all die. But the facts don't matter – we can't bear to lose the people we love, and it doesn't quite register about the billions who die, or even about our own coming deaths. We don't experience our own death the way we experience the deaths of those we love.

I had once asked him if he felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed.

Don't look back. Go to the car and don't look back." "Looking back is all I've got," he said.

The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia.

it was magic to feel you had things to say and people to say them to, and a gentle fog of contentment filled the bar...

If being young is a crime scene," I said, "the evidence from that night is everywhere.

MEMORY IS A KIND of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the past's genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone.

You are a human being. And that's and unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.

He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google. 'You're just not going deep enough,' Luke said. 'Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.

You're just America-on-ice.

Tully Dawson made himself new to the world, and ripe for the glories of that summer, by showing he was unlike his father.

The colour red doesn't actually exist,' she said. 'It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.

It isn't always the fittest who survive, but the people who have the information, those who clock the exits. I could find in relentless occupation what I could never find in helplessness: a way through.