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" Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life. "
Lawrence Osborne
Boredom
Desire
People
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" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Change
Me
Mother
" One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco. "
Lawrence Osborne
Winter
World
Know
" My favorite whisky bar in the world is in my adopted Bangkok. A refined and secretive Japanese speakeasy among the girly bars of Soi 33, it's called Hailiang. "
Lawrence Osborne
Girly
Bar
Bangkok
" Bangkok is infamously mired in lurid contradiction, but it's also a city of subtle and distorted moods that journalism and film have hitherto mostly failed to capture. "
Lawrence Osborne
Bangkok
City
Film
" My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world. "
Lawrence Osborne
Academic
World
Very
" Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature - for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it. "
Lawrence Osborne
History
Human Nature
Me
" Arak means 'sweat' in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion. "
Lawrence Osborne
Opinion
Drink
Perfect
" '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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Book
Year
Great
" The best times to visit the Gobi and Three Camel Lodge are June, and September through October. By the beginning of November, it is ferociously cold, while October can swing surreally between warm days and clear, chilly nights and frosty mornings dusted with snow - perfect. "
Lawrence Osborne
Snow
Beginning
Best
" Shoes tell you a lot about someone. Think of 'Strangers on a Train.' The first thing we see are Bruno's shoes. We know right away that something is up. "
Lawrence Osborne
Train
You
Shoes
" That's all you do in life: you find your perch, and if it suits you, just carry on. There's nothing Graham Greene about it. "
Lawrence Osborne
Carry
You
Suits
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Hate
Me
World
" I love the novel as a form, as an adventure of mind and soul. Really, I absolutely love writing them; they consume my days and nights - what can I say? But I am an avid film student, too: I watch a movie every night. "
Lawrence Osborne
Night
I Am
Adventure
" Thailand was never a European colony, so even though the city is very Western on the surface, deep down it's very Asian. It's quite enigmatic, and I like that. I can't get to the bottom of Bangkok, and I never will. "
Lawrence Osborne
City
Like
Never
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Cells
Energy
Living
" I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained. "
Lawrence Osborne
Desert
Right
Simplicity
" I'll wager there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck - and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both. "
Lawrence Osborne
Life
Reality
Experience
" Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time. "
Lawrence Osborne
You
Beautiful
Suffering
" I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it. Those people, like novelists, who can no longer enjoy this status are condemned to despise it. "
Lawrence Osborne
People
Long
Culture
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Flowers
Good
Friendship
" I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form. "
Lawrence Osborne
You
Memoir
Never
" In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her little boy to grow up so that she can take him to Alaska to experience the real snow, which he never knew as a little boy in the tropics. "
Lawrence Osborne
Boy
Experience
Mother
" Muslims do drink, as anyone who has spent a wild weekend with Saudi booze tourists in Bahrain will know. Those Saudi tourists are like teenage girls in Manchester on a Saturday night. But each country and region is different. "
Lawrence Osborne
Know
Night
Saturday
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
You
Start
Me
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Country
Driven
Outside
" There's something attractive about making people temporarily forget their actual age by taking them out of their normal lives so completely. Doesn't travel, by its very nature, strive to do this? "
Lawrence Osborne
Forget
Age
Nature
" New York was very congenial to me when I was young, like most people. I met my comrades in arms and partied hard. It's the way it should be, and then you get sick of it. "
Lawrence Osborne
Young
People
Me
" I grew up in the small town of Haywards Heath, south of London. "
Lawrence Osborne
Small
Town
Small Town
" In Bangkok's budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre. "
Lawrence Osborne
Literary
Scene
Centre
" The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn't need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a little quiet music and a gentle freedom from priests. "
Lawrence Osborne
Gentle
Quiet
Need