The aphorist must peep through cracks. To see things whole would shame us into silence.
We are humble in the hope of being praised for our humility.
I took fewer drugs than my friends, having fewer brain cells to spare.
If at first you don’t succeed, get a man in.
Do politicians speak like politicians at home? “My policy of fidelity towards you, my darling, is aspirational rather than a target…”
With its fusion of intimacy and anonymity, immediacy and inconsequence, the internet is a pool for our lowest instincts to paddle in. As for online politics forums, they expose the id at the start of ideology.
We traduce the world when we fail to wonder at it.
Don’t sweat about the flames, the flood will put them out.
He can’t love; she can’t empathise. There can be no legislating for hidden disabilities.
According to Swift, Man is rationis capax: a species capable of reason. We are also capable of running 100 metres in under ten seconds, but it’s not a talent given to many.
As we grow older we slow down because we can glimpse our destination.
It doesn’t take much – a couple of tramps relieving themselves in our tenement stair – to turn me from liberal Quaker to fascist eugenicist. What would I become if sorely tested?
The failure of extraterrestrial intelligence to contact us may well be proof of its existence.
At the root of our inaction is a refusal to credit the normalisation of catastrophe. Where is it written that reality cannot be outlandish?
Of all own goals, few are as humiliating as having our self-deprecation taken literally.
The bright blessed day – except for insomniacs.
People’s faces when they read. I like especially those who look quietly indignant.
Sometimes, throwing a book across the room is the only possible form of criticism.
Be wary of polemic. A novel lands heavily when launched from a pulpit.
Under the greed for all there is to read, a colder current runs: when will the output cease?
The writer’s task: to search hard for something that looks found.
When the last forests vanish, so will the words for describing what we have lost.
A published writer is like an archer who cannot find his arrows. Who knows if any found its target?
If the words find you in a rainstorm, get wet for them.
The peculiar melancholy of leafing through a decades-old literary journal. All that hope and promise that never came to fruition, or did so unregarded, while history slobbered on.
A hundred percent cure for my bibliophilia: boycott all book outlets that stock nothing of mine.
Don’t reconcile yourself to disappointment: make a home in it.
I don’t believe in ghosts, fear seeing one, and resent their failure to reveal themselves to me.
Every phase of our lives is passing; we are only uniquely present the moment we cease – whereupon we are gone.
Don’t imagine that you can say anything new. Hope at best for some felicitous rephrasing.
Power does not need censorship. It has only to co-opt the human desire not to know.
Amnesia can be bought and forgetfulness hastened by such interests as are inconvenienced by remembrance. Regarding America, and with apologies to Lichtenberg: Let the Astroturf be laid over it.
Make it specific. The word to avoid in descriptive prose is “some”.
We can only maintain promise by not attempting to realise it. Even then, the damp rises.
Lovers who have tongues for each other but eyes only for the street display in public not affection but a conjoined narcissism.
The past is a work in progress.
Reading bad writing can be instructive but it leaves a bad vibe in the brain that corrupts the good writing we read to recover from it. A degraded public discourse taints thought in much the same way. How can we breathe freely when the air is thick with cliché?
Know that you’re a fool, but don’t treat yourself like one.
Publishing is an industry – with all that implies of tenderness towards its raw materials.
Children don’t really believe in bogeymen. Governments do.
An aphorism disdains a proverb to console itself for its own obscurity.
Everyone seems to have a second home who lives in Dumfries and Galloway.
Certain lessons cannot be taught, only learned.
Your writing must reach beyond you – otherwise publication is a grotesque attempt to impose yourself on others.
Is suicide uniquely human? I have watched ducks attempt to drown themselves countless times, yet they always bottle it at the last moment.
“He has paid his debt to nature”; how astute the phrase. Yet we have lived so long on credit that our deaths will scarcely pay off the interest.
Descriptive realism risks a Pooterish accumulation. Sterne and Diderot were free to play; later novelists were constrained by the furniture. And yet too precise a narrative – containing an exact sufficiency of detail and only such dialogue as illuminates character or advances the plot – will smell of artifice because not one word is superfluous. Life is full of waste and redundancy. It needs the ordering that art can give, but if life’s imitation is too tightly choreographed, all we notice is the dancers and not the dance.
Eventually, given its mania for conspiracy theories, the radical right will accuse the polluting industries of a scam to keep environmentalists in work.
Even the best writers have their faults, and the race for universal acclaim cannot be won. Endeavour then to fail as interestingly as possible.
My one instance of seeming emulation has been to plagiarise a famous author pre-emptively. Though you write first, you cannot publish second.
I don’t need to make it big, only to make it through.
Mangled they may be, and public transport for fleas, yet we should value pigeons. I can’t imagine anyone from the Council eating vomit off our doorsteps on a Sunday morning.
Beware the unreluctant prophet of doom.
My agent sends me my Life Sales figures. She might as well have posted a package containing a sharp-edged sheet of paper and a slice of lemon.
Small r relativism offers only limited protection against unpleasant realities. If I am stamping on your head, that’s a fact, not a point of view.
When Americans meet a billionaire, they wonder how he did it. When Europeans meet the same, we wonder who he did it to.
Mid-June, yet on the mountains thin eyelets of snow remain. Admiring those pristine patches, I dream of making the ascent and despoiling them with my boot prints.
There was a time when I’d have thought I could wing it. Now I’m confident only of getting into a flap.
The ghost orchid has become extinct. In dying out it lived up to its name.
Become extinct? Language can encompass non-existence only through its opposite. Similarly, “he is dead” is a kind of evasion. Even the pronoun is of questionable validity.
A heartbeat for some is the rhythm of life, for others a countdown.
F’s assertion, all those years ago, that he would pray for me, remains in my memory unsurpassed as an act of verbal aggression.
Most of us fear extinction. Beckett feared that he might not achieve it.
I take my sister’s Labrador for a walk, and suddenly reticent Hampshire might be rural Ireland. The English own dogs in order to talk to one another.
In private, the prude longs to shed a letter.
Consented, perhaps, even married, but no one ever fancied out of pity.
A paddling pool of a man, the shallows of B’s personality sufficed to drown his children.
A stroke of luck is a blow to addicts of complaint.
Man is the cherub with a forked tail.
You wouldn’t take a dump in front of a friend, yet we do in front of the mirror, which is our enemy.
Checking out a girl on the train when she scratches back a sl
eeve to reveal a forearm hatched with scars, each one a spectral laceration on my prying eyes.
There is privilege inherent in complaint; the powerless know that no one is listening.
Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer.
Genetic determinism overlooks the possibility that we are hardwired to transcend our natures.
As if to prove how far we’ve fallen, the encomia on the back of a book on kindness declare it a “call to arms” and “a little hand-grenade of a book”.
How many in church on Sunday pray not to God, but for God to exist?
Past thirty, all exercise is mere postponement.
That summer, the mosquito, conscience, kept me awake.
Virtue belongs to those who resist a harmful talent. You cannot admire the honesty of a lousy liar.
Perfect memory would paralyse a writer, as we would know each time we trod on someone else’s sentences.
Some things must be seen through to be seen.
To hate someone is to assume a kind of intimacy with them; hence the electorate’s rage against politicians, fomented because the object of hatred cannot return it.
We all know the punishment of Tantalus, yet is there a mythical torment based on indecision?
Effort can only get you so far. Consider the four-foot tennis ace, the six-foot jockey: one cannot grow nor the other shrink into the fulfilment of their gifts.
It is because we look for patterns that we find them, though they need not be proof of a design. Precognition is merely the coincidence we’ve remembered.
Both assaults came as painful shocks to me, yet it should have been obvious that a lout isn’t going to change suddenly for the better when you define him to his face.
The shallowest minds go off the deep end.
A play of excruciating mediocrity wins plaudits in Edinburgh, on account, perhaps, of the painful experiences that inspired it. And sure, the absence of sincerity will tarnish a work, yet its presence in abundance is no substitute for art.
It takes a strong stomach to have a clear eye.
Sometimes you feel doubly awake, for a minute only, or a few seconds, and the world is charged with grandeur. Perhaps we need the pettiness of our preoccupations in order to keep our heads from exploding.
Might the hidden grounds of religious opposition to masturbation be that it is a form of incest?
Even in the deserts we are all on thin ice.
Why do political journalists associate smiling with a “human face”? A scowl, a grimace, a sneer are no less representative of the species.
Popular hostility to the knowledge that we are animals baffles me, as therein lies our only hope of absolution.
If a virus could think as we do, it too would imagine itself to be exceptional.
Some couples separate to escape the loneliness of being together.
The left patronises in word, the right in deed. This may be why so many working-class Americans vote Republican. We prefer to be exploited for our ignorance than to be informed of it.
The greatest danger for aphorists is that they affect the smugness of the disabused. No one is more readily duped than a smartarse.
It is always a surprise to us that other people behave exactly as we do.
To withstand your grief, offer it as tribute to the one extinct.
Even without the accent, I betray my Englishness by complaining about the weather. To a Glaswegian, rain is just another word for air.
If all hated peoples around the world obeyed the command to “go back where they came from”, there would be some serious overcrowding in the Great Rift Valley.
One of the crueller ironies of the ecological crisis is that our noblest instincts are subverted. The impulses to breed, to feed and hoard for the security of our young, have all become deadly urges, while the sterility of the miser is a gesture of solidarity with the future.
With European flights grounded, gone was the need to leap on a plane to escape the din of aircraft.
Sexual propriety is the want of opportunity promoted to a virtue.
Stare long enough at your reflection and you will see, with a creak of panic, not your own features but those, utterly strange, of your fellow man.
Thanks to modern communications, we can watch a catastrophe unfold, in real time, on the far side of the world. Technology makes us hobbled gods, all-seeing yet powerless to intervene.
When, in old age, her last lover died, she declared herself a virgin: untouched by a living hand.
I am an evangelist for therapy. You cannot walk away from something that keeps tripping you up.
We call the Nations a Family – and then wonder why they squabble.
A tree, though rooted, is still travelling.
Behind every aphoristic assertion there should be the watermark of a question.
Another job application comes to naught. What I call, self-consolingly, fate is really just a lack of qualifications.
If a man treads on your toe, tread on his, but first remove your foot from under it.
It’s easy to be cocksure in expecting the worst. Nobody defines themselves as cautiously pessimistic.
Truth is the goal but plausibility is the destination.
Our chickens coming home to roost have the hunch and lope of vultures.
It would be easier to pin our hopes on humanity if we did not belong to it. Knowing myself, I have few illusions.
Whence this cultural hostility to childlessness, whereby those who have chosen to resist the selfish gene find themselves accused of egotism?
In defence of the aphorism, we can at least agree that of all forms it is the most useless for those wishing to ingratiate themselves with the reader.
Reading Marcus Aurelius on the loo, it occurs to me that wisdom is neither progressive nor cumulative. It must be reiterated. This need not be a cause for gloom: it means that the dead can always surprise us.
Constancy in politics is pitched as a virtue, and yet to change our mind is to demonstrate that we still have one.
Perhaps we weep because our weeping alters nothing.
Good prose takes the long way round in pursuit of a short cut to the reader.
Where we cannot bring change, let us at least irk.
Only when we suffer personally are we roused to evasive action. For most of us, a tarred gannet is no reason to cycle after an oil spill.
Many that boast about their love of liberty overstate their commitment. I’m all for free speech but I suspect the only thing that I would defend to the death is my life.
The Lost Art of Losing Page 3