“One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.”

“So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.”

“I couldn't have written [What Good Are The Arts?] because I--and I'm not alone, by any means--do not have Carey's breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles.”

“Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything—-how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there—one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?)...”

“And it’s not that I’m so unhappy I don’t want to live any more. That’s not what it feels like. It feels more like I’m tired and bored and the party’s gone on too long and I want to go home.”

“Nobody worries about kids listeningto thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery andloss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most;and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve beenlistening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”

“Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say....”