Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.

Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply.

I grew up in a working-class community. I come from a big family. I knew Donald Trump would win because I knew he is what poor Americans think a rich person looks like. And I knew that Hillary Clinton would annoy voters in their tens of millions, because she basically sucked at communicating with poor people and seemed like a person who'd been powerful and rich for decades. She was a disastrous candidate. I mean, she was up against a psychopath and she still lost. The country's thinking was beyond her, literally.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

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.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

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.

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.

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

Interviewing is not a democratic art.