But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.

What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation…

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years… whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.

It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And.

How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably.

Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.

I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell. It.

Experience rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. Writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pout it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.

Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti.

You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.

Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan’s sister’s house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

When in the presence of a child, get on the floor.

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.

9. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: ‘If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

Beggars cannot be choosers.

Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

I couldn’t afford to be offended.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons.

Thirty years – almost all of them really happy. That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over…

If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.

If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.

I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway.

Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.

Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets… one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.

But I was so much older then,” sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, “I’m younger than that now.

Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.

I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines – I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time.

My evidence – such as it is – is almost always intimate. I feel this – do you? I’m struck by this thought – are you.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

But sometimes it’s like you just meet someone and you just know that you’re totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother – or your sister. Even if they don’t, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don’t matter if they do or they don’t see that for what it is – all you can do is put the feeling out there. That’s your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That’s the deal.

Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu’ onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio.

So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes – and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.

The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.

Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.

I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.

Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh.

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.

And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing – loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing – loads of white people.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: ‘To give them no excuse.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.

Nobody can cast themselves out.

I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win.

Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.

When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

To her credit, though, Trace didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

You can feel bad… I mean, that’s not illegal.

At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Did all friendships – all relations – involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power.