36 Quotes by Ned Beauman

That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father's ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you'd never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing. That was what people always said. And she's had no fall to speak of, but a hell of a lot of landing to make up for it.

...a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.

accidents, like women, allude

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox.