Ned Beauman Quotes & Sayings

I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly. — Ned Beauman

Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing. — Ned Beauman

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. — Ned Beauman

It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. — Ned Beauman

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

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard. — Ned Beauman

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since. — Ned Beauman

You know she'll probably be at the party tonight? Which is why I'm absolutely not going if we don't get some coke.'
'Egon, why is it that every single time you're obliged to be in the same room with one of your ex-girlfriends you have to make it into a huge emergency? It's incredibly boring.'
'Come on. You know how it is. You catch sight of an old flame and get this breathless
animal prickle like a fox in a room with a hound. And then all night you have to seem carefree and successful and elated, which is a pretence that for some reason you feel no choice but to maintain even though you know they're better qualified than anyone else
in the world to detect immediately that you're really the same hapless cunt as ever.'
'That's adolescent. The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate and predictable that you have so few of them. It's one of those elegant self-regulating systems that one so often finds in nature. — Ned Beauman

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often. — Ned Beauman

I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries. — Ned Beauman

He realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine ... Perhaps if he got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain. — Ned Beauman

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day. — Ned Beauman

There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice. — Ned Beauman

She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children. — Ned Beauman

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. — Ned Beauman

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager. — Ned Beauman

I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more. — Ned Beauman

The Nazis, he had written in his latest, are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal relationship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don't assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology. — Ned Beauman

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything. — Ned Beauman

accidents, like women, allude — Ned Beauman

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. — Ned Beauman

What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless. — Ned Beauman

You couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn't truly love anything if you didn't hate almost everything. — Ned Beauman

You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little
darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream. — Ned Beauman

What does it do?" said Loeser.
"You feel as if you're being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it's as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to he replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can't really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down." Hildkraut smiled wistfully. "It's fantastic." At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. "And it makes Wagner sound really good. — Ned Beauman

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. — Ned Beauman

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder. — 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. — Ned Beauman

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. — Ned Beauman

Loeser found it hard to believe that God was forever slapping the face of the universe like a policeman trying to stop a drunk from falling asleep. — Ned Beauman