Date: 2000

"Looking at the leaves turn red in the valley simplifies my mind, a javelin flying past those tightly packed tubes of paint in which so many subtle frequencies of light have been trapped, and landing where there is only blood and fire."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn't hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This lonely organ, which has appeared to be imprisoned in the skull, tormenting intellectuals throughout history,' said Jean-Paul merrily, 'may after all be a transceiver, tuning into various types of extraphysical mind, and contributing to them with its own broadcasts.'"

— 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

"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

"Faced with this curvature of his imagination, he experienced a fresh outbreak of self-allergy."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)