A.L. Kennedy Quotes

You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.

— A.L. Kennedy

I can't help it either, the laughing: solemn gatherings, slow
ballads, pompous orations, any person or occasion that assumes I'll
offer my unreserved respect: I tend to find them all hysterical in the
end. Especially if someone similar is there to set me off. They don't
have to do much: I recognize what it looks like when somebody's
composure starts to strip itself away. They'll maybe cross their arms
with that twitchy, shaky, tension, or they'll grab down little wheezes
of embarrassed air, or they'll simply hood their faces under their
palm, trying to hide how fast they're slipping, how fast *we're*
slipping, because I'll be weakening with them by then, I'll be just as
lost, pulled equally tight against the moment when we both stop caring
and let it disgrace us
when we laugh.

— A.L. Kennedy

“Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“The right wrist, because I'm right-handed - so that must be the one that's done most wrong. Although, now that I think, my sins have mostly been ambidextrous.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you'd get when you hugged her, or rolled over onto her pillow when she wasn't there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they'd fit their chin down over the woman's shoulder and there would be this smile, a particular young-seeming grin with closed eyes - always made him think - bliss.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“Perhaps i am a masochist.
No. Not Possible. If I were basically a masochist then most of my life would have been just nothing but concentrated fun. Every time I woke up, bleeding from my heart and soul, I'd find myself barely able to hide my joy.”

— A.L. Kennedy

There are times when you've personally known things to misfire
the sentence that fell badly, the dull gift, slapdash comment, hobbled punch line, tight-fisted tip
trying to be too stupid, trying to be too clever, too silly, too carefree, too caring, too free. You can think back to those long and hollow pauses when you realised that you'd misjudged a mood, weren't paying attention, had taken the wrong risk.

— A.L. Kennedy

“I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would - but there isn't. So I drink.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“Writers' trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven't met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly.”

— A.L. Kennedy

If ever the difficulties of your life seem overwhelming, consider the prospect of being eaten alive by savage penguins and rejoice that such horrors are unknown to you.

— A.L. Kennedy

“I end up discussing the weather when the weather is all around us and both I and whoever the stranger might be must surely have noticed it. We would be better off asking each other if our faces are still there.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“But the silent majority and I do have one memorial, at least. The Disaster. We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines; the occasional incendiary incident, or a wall of pale faces, crushed against grillwork, one Saturday afternoon in Spring. This is not enough.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“Toreros must also be accustom themselves to a career which will inevitably involve injury by goring: sometimes serious, if not grotesque, goring. No matter what your personal opinion of the corrida may happen to be, these facts are inescapable: in the corrida, bulls and men meet fear and pain and both may die.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“Being me is a job - is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn't something people give away and then there's drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That's a full-time occupation: that's like being a miner, or a nurse.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“He's doing something in Surbiton next. Or Serbia, one or the other.”

— A.L. Kennedy

“Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back,”

— A.L. Kennedy

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than finding out you were wrong when you thought you were loved.

— A.L. Kennedy

“Surgery is just stabbing in a courteous environment”

— A.L. Kennedy