British - Novelist | -
My mother sent me and my sisters to Italy every year for language school, so I spent a lot of my teenage years in Florence and Rome. After university I went to Harvard for a year, dropped out, and then went to Paris, where I ended up staying 10 years. It's different from being American: If you're British, you're expected to live at the far corners.
Lawrence Osborne
MotherLiveSchoolMeLanguageYear
Studies in the emerging field of cellular bioenergetics, a branch of biochemistry concerned with how energy flows through living systems, suggest that molecules from orchids might be able to repair decaying mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, in humans.
EnergyRepairLivingThroughCells
The orchid's association in Chinese culture with such virtues as elegance, good taste, friendship, and fertility goes all the way back to Confucius himself, who was said to have a particular attachment to the flowers.
FriendshipGoodCultureFlowersBack
'The Odyssey' is a great poem to refugee-dom... Odysseus is not entirely a refugee... he's somebody who's blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme... I reread it every year... That's not as surprising as it sounds, because it's a rip-roaring book.
GreatBookYearExplorationTheme
In Bangkok's budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre.
BangkokSceneLiteraryBudding
So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write.
LiveMeDinnerStartCareFestivals
I don't know where this thing about me being a travel writer comes from. It's nothing to do with me; I hate travel writing. I don't do it - I do it a little bit, but not much. I don't believe in it. I think it's over. The world is so saturated now that you don't need it.
HateTravelMeWritingWorldThink
Asa Briggs was a historian of class history, so he felt obligated to bring in his driver. That's the English class thing that is much weaker now.
HistoryNowClassBringEnglishHe
My grandfather was an amazing cap-in-hand guy.
AmazingGrandfatherGuy
I left New York after my mother died and, rather aimlessly, had settled in Istanbul for a change of scene. It was a rather dramatic gesture on my part, since I'd lived in New York for 20 years, but I felt I needed something different - the escalating expense and pressure of New York had begun to weary me.
ChangeMotherNew YorkMePressure
To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.
MeResearchLongYouPenPlace
There's a distinct unease about Americans when they are outside the United States. I can't say quite what it is, but they are easily spooked or driven to cynicism - the country is diverse but, paradoxically, extremely insular.
CountrySayOutsideCynicismDriven
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Lawrence Osborne quotes