59 Quotes by Lawrence Osborne

Many travelers get into trouble in places like Dubai by assuming that it is sufficiently Western for them to drink as they do back home. But elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is quite controlled, and the non-Muslim will be steered down a fairly narrow path.

Muslims do drink, as anyone who has spent a wild weekend with Saudi booze tourists in Bahrain will know. Those Saudi tourists are like teenage girls in Manchester on a Saturday night. But each country and region is different.

I have found that whiskey is enjoyed as a refined secret pleasure in many cities - and it appears to be popular in Pakistan, as it is all over the tropical Asian world, Muslim or non-Muslim.

Shoes tell you a lot about someone. Think of 'Strangers on a Train.' The first thing we see are Bruno's shoes. We know right away that something is up.

So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write.

Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do.

I think humans are migratory animals.