One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.
~ Sebastian Faulks
He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.
There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.These are just the ... the unfound. When she could speak again. From the whole war?The man shook his head. Just these fields.Elizabeth sat on the steps. No one told me. My God no one told me
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and hadn't eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.
I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.
In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.
A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn't last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn't endure, or can't be logically proved and pinned down, it's worthless.
I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.
My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I hung on, it was so worth it.'
