Date: 2000

"I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This lonely organ, which has appeared to be imprisoned in the skull, tormenting intellectuals throughout history,' said Jean-Paul merrily, 'may after all be a transceiver, tuning into various types of extraphysical mind, and contributing to them with its own broadcasts.'"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilisation, beyond the complacencies of archaeology."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"The moment I stop writing, a fungus invades my mind and, instead of the marble on which I was carving my epitaph, I am surrounded by the soft garbage of circumstance, my own death amounting to nothing more than a further mess."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I am grateful that my own mind is being ripped open again and again by dying and gambling and Angelique and my adorable daughter and the beauty of this island."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"He hadn't yet organised his memories of the conference into anecdote and he knew that unless he gave them that structure they would slip down the nearest drain."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Faced with this curvature of his imagination, he experienced a fresh outbreak of self-allergy."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Why was the copula between the brain and the mind plunged in an obligatory darkness?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"He must get the whole thing clear, like a diagram hanging in the translucent space of his imagination, the blueprint of a missile that would lay waste to the Great Consciousness Debate."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)