"'Well, you said that you were going to have relationships and then you were going to get married.'
'I didn't say I was going to get married.'
'Technically I suppose you didn't, no.' (Actually I bloody didn't, either)
'But?'
She put her head on one side and was pushing the crumbs of her lunch around the plate. Then she looked up. Why can you always tell when people are going to say nasty things to you?
'But you're not odd enough not to.'"
—Julian Barnes, Metroland
"At twenty-one, I used to say I believed in the deferment of pleasure; I was usually misunderstood. Deferment was the word, not rejection or repression or abandonment or all of the other terms it automatically got translated into. I'm less sure now, though I do believe in the balanced, delicate leading-in of the individual to experience. This isn't presciptive; just sensible. How many kids of twenty-one today are sentiently burnt out; or worse, find it chic to believe they are? Isn't a diet of extremity senseless and, finally, comic? Isn't the whole structure of experience built on contrast?"
—Julian Barnes, Metroland
"You would think Saul [Bellow] would be in a stupor of self-satisfaction because his work was so celebrated. He didn't say it till quite close to the end when a friend came in, who was almost the same age, and asked, ' Well, what have you got to say for yourself, Bellow?' And Saul, from his hospitalic bed in his own house, said, 'I've been thinking. Now which is it? Is it: there goes a man or there goes a jerk?' And his friend, Karl, said, 'There goes a man.' And Saul said, 'OK. I'll take your word for it.'"
—Martin Amis, "The Voice of Experience," The Times
"When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap."
—Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits"