I don’t believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I’ve ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
You’ll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
I wasn’t like other boys. At any rate, I wasn’t like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it’s all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism – Barack Obama’s victory is a manifestation not of Washington’s need for change, but of America’s. That is not how democracy works in England. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive – no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries. Andrew O'Hagan Read Quote
