Lost for Words Quotes

“We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Rome wasn’t deconstructed in a day.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“If you were madly in love, you’d want me to win,’ said Katherine.

“‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Sam. ‘I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else’s egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.’

“‘Oh,’ said Katherine, ‘you mean you’re not going to enable my egoism.’

“‘Okay, okay,’ said Sam ‘you’re right – love is doing everything you want all the time.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn’t all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn’t have been the real thing.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“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.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“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.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp,’ said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“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?”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“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....”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words

“Like a man walking backwards along a path, erasing his footsteps with a broom, he had tried, through contradiction, negation, paradox, unreliable narration and every other method he could devise, to cancel the tracks left by his words and to release his writing from the wretched positivity of affirming anything at all. He”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words