Edward St. Aubyn

"Mrs Hickmann was inclined to forgive Patrick the apparent purposelessness of his life and the sinister pallor of his complexion, when she considered that he has an income of one hundred thousand pounds a year, and came from a family which, although it had done nothing since, had seen the Norman invasion from the winning side."

"He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn’t carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?"

"There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who know that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror."

"The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child."

"Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?"

"In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’."

"The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates."

"Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent."

"What is a strain is being forced into the lobster pot of good behaviour while being forced to sing its praises."

"Johnny stopped and leaned over, partly from curiosity, but also to disguise the fact that his sexual efforts could not compete with the mention of such a large sum of money."

"Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity."

"Patrick imagined Kay’s father sunk in the back of the car, his eyes glazed over with exhaustion and his lungs, like torn fishing nets, trawling vainly for air."