Best 39 quotes of Edward St Aubyn on MyQuotes

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.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

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

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the 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.

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.

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

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

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

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won't drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that's fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

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 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.

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

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.

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

An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?

He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death.

He wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?

His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

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

I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, "the present," disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!

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.

Is there ever anything to get unduly worried about,' Peter couldn't help asking, 'when there are so many things to worry about duly?

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.

Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now.

People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.

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.

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.

The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.

There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it....

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?

We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?

Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?