Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

...with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.

Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably.

Who let the dogs in? ...This, we fear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.

Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.

Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw.

As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.

I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.

After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.

In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.

She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.

Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.

You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.

Evidentemente questa la caratteristica della citt contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.

Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich...Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich...The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.

It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?

On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions on Calchalk Street were softly cackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures, panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect.

Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren't going to help her out. They had been put together with only one thing in mind: to lock her in.

Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only an end.

Pain is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we’ve got the message.

Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available; this very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance to the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature -- he didn't know the brand -- of the availability.

If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say.

[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.

Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.

Making lots of money--it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch. ch. 1, p. 23 in Penguin paperback

Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.

It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.

Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings.

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.

Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.