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All Quotes by author - Lawrence Osborne
" Arak means 'sweat' in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion. "
Opinion
Drink
Perfect
" 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. "
History
Driver
Class
" At the end of the 18th century, a young British explorer named George Bogle became one of the first Westerners to penetrate the mysterious and reclusive realm of Druk Yul, or 'Dragon Land.' "
Young
Mysterious
Land
" 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. "
Bangkok
City
Film
" Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life. "
Boredom
Desire
People
" Exams are not very hard. People find them hard because they don't work - it's just a matter of labour. Once you actually start doing it, it's like cracking eggs. You don't need to be smart. As everything is in life, it's about concentration. "
Life
Smart
People
" 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. "
Hate
Me
World
" I grew up in the small town of Haywards Heath, south of London. "
Small
Town
Small Town
" I have found that whiskey is enjoyed as a refined secret pleasure in many cities - and it appears to be popular in Pakistan, as it is all over the tropical Asian world, Muslim or non-Muslim. "
Pleasure
Secret
World
" 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. "
Change
Me
Mother
" 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. "
Life
Reality
Experience
" 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. "
Night
I Am
Adventure
" I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this. "
My Life
Life
Decision
" In Bangkok's budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre. "
Literary
Scene
Centre
" 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. "
Boy
Experience
Mother
" 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. "
Desert
Right
Simplicity
" I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside. "
Time
Boredom
Society
" I still miss qualities of Khmer life that are hard to quantify: the slow, sensual pace, the hovering presence of the past, the vast skies filled with terrifying and beautiful butts. And, of course, the food. "
Life
Past
Beautiful
" 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. "
You
Memoir
Never
" I think humans are migratory animals. "
Think
Animals
Humans
" I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do. "
Us
Think
Nice
" 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. "
People
Long
Culture
" Many travelers get into trouble in places like Dubai by assuming that it is sufficiently Western for them to drink as they do back home. But elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is quite controlled, and the non-Muslim will be steered down a fairly narrow path. "
Trouble
Path
World
" 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. "
History
Human Nature
Me
" Mongolians are epic drinkers and carousers, and in this respect, they are extremely congenial to my own way of thinking. "
Way
Own
Thinking
" More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.' "
Beautiful
Famous
Song
" 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. "
Know
Night
Saturday
" 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. "
Girly
Bar
Bangkok
" My grandfather was an amazing cap-in-hand guy. "
Guy
Amazing
Grandfather
" 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. "
You
American
School
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