Quotes from Edward St. Aubyn

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,' said Patrick. 'The rest is packaging.

It's the hardest addiction of all,' said Patrick. 'Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.

Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.

Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.

With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker.

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place