Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
someone-you-love firsts one-you-love
The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.
struggle people principles
A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
dream jobs winning
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.
thinking tests limits
Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.
loneliness home dark
My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation.
people stranger knows
Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.
wise
We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.
writing discovery self
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
art democratic
Interviewing is not a democratic art.
country book scotland
It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.
art breathing museums
A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
football passion fans
Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.
art mean selected
Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
friday daughter believe
Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply.