About Edward St Aubyn: Edward St Aubyn is an English author and journalist. He is the author of eight novels. In 2006, Mother's Milk was nominated for the Booker prize.
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
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....
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.
In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.
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.
If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.
Waiting for a book to be published is like having a baby. It would be nine months before we heard the patter of tiny pages trotting through the letter box, and the bookcase shuffled it's shelves in boredom and I was a martyr to morning sickness.
That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of magazine.
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 gr...
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.
Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.
Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.
It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.
The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.
I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.
The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.
Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
