Mark George

“No matter how often you come back to Paris, if you go away that first time, you leave behind the life you might have led there, the man you might have been, the essays you might have written at the cafe tables, the manifestos you might have signed, the mastery you might have obtained over the French language and Paris taxi drivers. You might have risen high in French politics, romanced Ines de la Fressange from the top of a ladder, hatched a plan to fill in the Arc de Triomphe with a split level shopping mall, been run down in the Boulevard Saint-Germain by Françoise Sagan, buried in Père Lachaise and Natalie might have been your daughter. I can't imagine a more satisfactory life.”
― Clive James

“I had to leave Paris the next morning. As always I would wonder why and start counting the days before I could go back. And then lose count and be lost again in the life that, by some strange twist of fate, I lived somewhere else. Au revoir Paris. Bonjour tristesse.”
― Clive James

“When I was a child my ineptitude was a burden to my parents and my teachers. They could not see that it was a greater burden to me. I wondered wanly if I would ever discover how to do anything well. At long last I have learned something even better - how not to do anything at all.”
― Quentin Crisp

“I had always imagined, Westfield said, that one could either die tragically, cut short with much still to be done, or that one could die old and full of years, as the Bible has it, after having put one's house in order. I had never considered that there is a third alternative, in which one went on living and yet found no order in one's life, in which everything at the end was as confused and unfinished as it had always been.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations: A Literary Tapestry Where Past, Present, Imagination, and Truth Intertwine