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" 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
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" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
History
Driver
Class
" 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
" 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 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Pleasure
Secret
World
" 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
" My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise. "
Lawrence Osborne
Music
Parents
Grandparents
" 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 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
" 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
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Place
Research
Pen
" 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
" Arak means 'sweat' in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion. "
Lawrence Osborne
Opinion
Drink
Perfect
" 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
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Time
Boredom
Society
" 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.' "
Lawrence Osborne
Beautiful
Famous
Song
" 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
" 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
" My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world. "
Lawrence Osborne
Academic
World
Very
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
Life
Smart
People
" 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
You
American
School
" 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
" The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity. "
Lawrence Osborne
Insanity
Very
English
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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. "
Lawrence Osborne
My Life
Life
Decision
" 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
" 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