104 Quotes by Edward St Aubyn

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it’s cherished.

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.

Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn’t have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.