Quotes from Edward St Aubyn

Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.

It's amazing, isn't it? She seems to think there are better things to do than going to parties.' 'I always thought she was a little peculiar,' said Nicholas wisely.

Patrick asked him, not for the first time, but with renewed desperation, what it would mean to be free, to live beyond the tyranny of dependency and conditioning and resentment.

I think I'll get cremated here myself,' said Patrick. 'No need to rush,' said Johnny. 'I was going to wait until I died.' 'Good thinking.

We turn ignorance into an inner landscape and pretend that this allegorical enterprise, which might be harmless or even charming, if it weren't so expensive and influential, amounts to a science.

I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally, all ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don't live in a perfect world.

Het probleem van dingen doen die je eigenlijk niet wilde, was dat je je er opeens zo duidelijk van bewust werd wat voor andere dingen je allemaal had kunnen doen.

This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an alter- the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.

The best way to contradict him is to let him talk

She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.