68 Quotes by Andrew O'Hagan

I wasn’t like other boys. At any rate, I wasn’t like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.

Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...

I had once asked him if he felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed.

The colour red doesn’t actually exist,’ she said. ‘It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.

MEMORY IS A KIND of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the past’s genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone.

I was 10 when I realised I couldn’t stand football. I’d tried, obviously, before this – no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

I’ve been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don’t require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I’d come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.