Quotes from Elliot Perlman

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

In my work, I'm always trying not to put barriers up between the 'good poor' and the 'bad poor.' I'm not sure my work will change things much, but at the very least, you want to make people feel that they are not alone.

Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality.

Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all of its own that you can never know. It can capture, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile.

The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.

Being judgmental must surely be one of the most joyful activities known to the species and it is cruel that other animals are denied this pleasure.

you can drop those 'a'ints' too. It ain't 'acting white' to speak your own language properly. People fought for you to get the best possible education. It would break your grandpa's heart to hear you talk like nothing had changed.

MEMORY IS A WILLFUL DOG. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it's funny what you remember.

Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it's funny what you remember.

When the words dance privately for you, it is possible to feel not alone.

Anybody who doesn't want or need something is dead. And anyone who does need something can be hurt.

Have you ever expatiated on a particular experience to give a new acquaintance the impression of instant intimacy? It is not an uncommon form of flattery.

Exhale too fast and you'd blow them over and with them their memories would spill out onto the very European ground their families now fertilised.

What is it about men that makes women so lonely?

I had thought that I knew her affliction and not merely the fact of it. It was no stranger to me. I understood it emotionally, empathetically. But I had only ever touched down at its airport. She was a citizen of its vast interior.

She cried until the tears were no longer able to meet the demands of her sadness

The distance between what you say in a daydream and what you actually say to a superior at your place of work is proportional to the number of adults unsuccessfully seeking full-time employment.

As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

Charisma will sustain a relationship only in the way that strong coffee first thing in the morning will sustain a career.

What is it about men that make women so lonely?

You know you're in love with somebody when you wake up next to them, comfortable despite your breath smelling like the week-old water at the bottom of a vase, when you are terribly excited to see them, to talk to them again, having missed them after all that sleep.

Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused

There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.