James Hamilton-Paterson Quotes

The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.

Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly comtemplating their overdrafts.

I also wish I'd been born with a clearly defined talent for something, or else stupid.

I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant.

Out of the 65 million men mobilised between 1914 and 1918 by the Allies and the Central Powers combined, it is now generally estimated that some 9 million were killed outright and 21 million wounded. Even allowing for the first-ever air war’s restricted dimensions, the toll it took of flying men was minuscule compared to that of the trenches.

Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be bought or sold or measured by scientists. Why should artists have to acknowledge the complete supremacy of materialism? Must everything mysterious be exploded or all unaccountable things explained away? And if so, what is gained? Plain men drudging in a world of plain things. That's not the world I know and it's one I've no wish to know.

First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them forever after.

And now this same tropic opiate fills my lungs and heart and awakens memories of things which have never happened and foretelling things which will never be.

Experiences of great intensity - a special dream, a period of concentrated work, maybe a love affair - have in common that they are unusually real while they last. Yet it is precisely this quality which so easily vanishes. Afterwards, how unreal it all suddenly seems!

How vivid, still, are the seagoing smells? Oily bilges, fish entrails, a freshly lit cigarette drawn through salt paper? And at night, if you were not diving, the compressor's exhaust fumes, its lethal monoxides, barking and blattering our darkened boat's position for anyone to hear. But a shift of wind might gently lay its hand on a cheek and turn your head like a weathervane, pointing your nostrils into the smell of unseen land: forest and rot and copra, jasmine, mimosa and ylang-ylang. And you may have thought of the strangeness of it, sitting there in night's scented cocoon, propped up by nails and timber in the middle of the water while men you knew like brothers worked away in the fish mines far beneath the boat, their dim torchlight opening up fugitive seams and corridors. Their wooden goggles and floating hair.

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

We hang here, inquisitive carbon-based life forms, knowing that every atom of carbon now in our bodies was once in the interior of a star.

A culinary triumph: the ingenious use of food as an offensive weapon.

I’m interested in things that are none of my business,
and I’m bored by things that are important to know.” — Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes strip cartoon, 1994)

Racism. . . . fuelled by bitter assertions that no immigrant ever has the least respect for the environment in his adopted country because he never really believes it's his.

Well, finally it seems I've wasted my life. It's a hard age at which to drink spider-juice but I submit. Suddenly...I felt the flimsiness of all my substance, but not so much because I'd missed something. Quite the contrary — it was because of something of which I've had all too much: myself. I doubt it ever occurs to people who are not cursed with this 'urge to create' (whatever that is) how, far from living in sublime communion with one's Muse, one grows thoroughly to hate her.