Quotes from Edward St. Aubyn

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

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

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

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.

I just have to get rid of this piece of glass,' said Anne. 'I guess something broke here earlier?' 'It was me,' said Patrick.

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

Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.

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.

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.

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;

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.

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

a face like a crème brûlée after the first blow of the spoon

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment's reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.

Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.

If we can't control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven't recognized?

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.