Andrew Martin > Quotes

“In order to follow your heart, one must do the wrong thing”
― Andrew Martin

“I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight case against them in principle.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“I don't care about my life.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“A man washing up secretly imagines himself to be the head surgeon in an operating theater. He is entitled to bark out peremptory orders: 'Right! I'm ready for the pudding things now!”
― Andrew Martin, How to Get Things Really Flat

“What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“My goals at these things usually extended no further than making at least one moderately clever comment and trying not to spill anything on my shirt.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“New York, which I had complained about for so long, became a beacon, a place I missed terribly whenever I was away and then glutted myself on until I was sick when I came back. You move away from the city and suddenly everyone wants to have drinks. Nobody’ll hang out unless you leave.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“I don't even like most people.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“It had occurred to me lately that it was much more possible than I'd previously considered to be both 'self-aware' and fundamentally wrong about the nature of the self.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“Did you ever have the problem where you don't want to go where you're supposed to be, but you can't go where you want to be?”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“Erykah Badu”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“You are . . . depressed? Bored?"

"Are there other feelings?”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“The night felt forced, off-kilter. We were trying to have fun, fixating on what was available to us, but it was a stretch.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I put the story aside and added it to the growing list of things I was inadequate at or incapable of doing.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“What do you actually care about?"

"People," I said.

"All right, E.M. Forster.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“the dreamy endlessness of the afternoons spent deep in her own mind.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“But won't you miss me?" . . .

"I already do," he said.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I have a pretty clear memory of most of that night, but even while it was happening, it was like a dream, where you do things you don't want to do but can't control your own actions.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She was nauseous with anticipation . . . even as she knew that, even on TV, these kinds of things never seemed to actually work out.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely suppressed rage.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I wanted to understand her. I wanted her, more dubiously, to understand me.”
― Andrew Martin

“What happens at the end of a story? Something changes, or it doesn't. I like it best when things just stop.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“But it was true that I preferred to do nothing.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“Julia's defining quality, maybe, was her combination of outer normality, even placidity, and a roiling, crazily volatile inner life that expressed itself mainly in her writing.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She really was an excellent host, however many people her family had enslaved and murdered.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“Leslie didn’t feel welcome, though she recognized that this was, again, mostly her problem. Wasn’t alienation always your own fault? People were what they were. You could either get in line and find a way to make it work or be a soul adrift upon the wandering etc. People could surprise you. People were interesting. The problem was you.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“I just want her to be happy. But I don't think that's what she wants.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“So I did something that you're not supposed to do, one more addition to an expanding universe of said things.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She'd become an idea. She was an abstract thing I wanted, a thing that I already had, really, if I could keep it.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work