Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
anybody both certain curse good novelists places several
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
everybody good original possibly society spirited
Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they'd like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.
elitism feeling gallery good growing local room
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.
arrival bring deal earth good grow lived looking might point scene sea spend time until waves wonder
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.
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.
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.
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.