Quotes from Andrew O'Hagan

The past isn't really the past," Tully said. "It's just music, books, and films.

Reality's got a lot to answer for

You've got to be a prose professional, get out of bed every morning and say, what is pressing on my nerves? You've got to come out of your trap every morning life you are equal to your times.

You're doing great,' she said. 'You're in Birmingham .' Scullion wanted to say this was a contradiction in terms but he couldn't speak.

His was a country of fearful men: proud in the talking, paltry in the living, and every promise another lie.

We couldn't complete the world or ourselves. We could only live, and look for small graces, and learn to accept the munificence of change.

Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.

He didn't sing the words, he inebriated them.

Be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

I always knew I would come to London. I loved Glasgow, but it seemed filled with echoes of my parents' lives, and sometimes you just want a city of your own.

I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

You'll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity.

When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.

I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I've ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.