Date: 2000

"Mad thoughts. Sparks from the wheel."

— 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

"It was generally as he passed Didcot that the possibility of enjoyment, excitement and lightness of spirit slowly returned to his terrorised mind. Perhaps he was still in the shadow of that habit; perhaps his mind would clear once the train broke free of that foggy junction."

— 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

"Someone suggests he is in a mental fog."

— 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

"But even if the map came to match the territory in the spookiest possible way, there would still be a few hippies, philosophers and romantics who would insist that there was a real city under all that paper, a city of experience, lost in translation. The map makers would reply that there was ind...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"But she was still observing herself, and thereby observing herself observe herself, in the infinite regress of the witness box."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)