ABRAMS Press

The glory of show business is that it gives the people what they want. The glory of art is that it gives us what we never knew we wanted.

You will find that things that seem normal to you don’t seem normal to others, and might even be utterly reprehensible. Perhaps we are all evil. Or, perhaps none of us are.

WE LOVE KILLING. Which is great, because we need to kill to survive. Hungry? Kill something to eat. Sick? Kill the bacteria before they kill you. Threatened by something? Kill in self-defence. Not sure what it is? Kill it, just in case.

beat themselves up about it.

This is a book about how easy it is to convince yourself of things that are a) quite untrue and b) quite mad.

‘She and I were decidedly unhappy together owing to her weird, pernickety and pathologically fantastic character.’

If you can accept, or at least examine, those things, you are a fox. If you can’t accept them and you want to believe in that one big thing (‘We must serve God,

While Dostoevsky has profound, sometimes disturbing, insight into the human mind, Tolstoy has empathy for the human condition.

wax and wane

envy and regret are natural emotions, after all, and there has never been a historical era where everyone can have everything they want.