Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
country book scotland
It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.
people stranger knows
Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.
loneliness home dark
My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation.
thinking tests limits
Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.
someone-you-love firsts one-you-love
The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.
dream jobs winning
The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.
arrival bring deal earth good grow lived looking might point scene sea spend time until waves wonder
When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure.
affairs dismay glued growing human owe represent satirical shape
I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.
dreamer five haphazard harold learnt poets published reader taken terrifying
Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
central crucial discussion exists fallacy fiction horrible popular surely
There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?
britain filled greater people
You'll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity.
elitism feeling gallery good growing local room
When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.
among human literary
Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
everybody good original possibly society spirited
Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they'd like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.