“... same pattern: Carrère takes a character or set of characters and through lengthy digressions and self-reflection finds something both personal and universal in their struggles. He likes to call his books ‘non-fiction novels’ and cites In Cold Blood as his inspiration. But Truman Capote, who used the term himself, always stressed the author’s ...”

“... envelope of shit arrived through d’Offay’s letterbox. In one version of the philosophy of the self, we all operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. The distinction is existential, not moral. Episodicists feel and see little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of ...”

“... them to reveal whether they are taking the shortest road. Finally, he descries my unworthy self upon the road; and, instantly stopping his flying equipage, he demands of me (as one whom he believes to be a scholar and a man of honour) whether there is not, in the possibility of things, a shorter cut to Keswick. Now, the answer which rises to the lips ...”

“... omitted from, but appertaining to, earlier and perhaps weightier writings. A remarkable air of self-confidence informs the work of this author. Long before the old men of Stockholm bestowed their accolade on him (in 1981), Canetti wrote with the authority of one determined to make his readers take him at his own valuation: he saw himself as a major German ...”

“... that’s so, it may have to do with the intensity with which my fiction has focused upon the self-revealing dilemmas of a single, central character whose biography, in certain obvious details, overlaps with mine, and who is then assumed ‘to be’ me.The Ghost Writer was automatically described in the press as ‘autobiographical’ – which means ...”

“... yet I play this game only to thaw That icy stare, because I’m still in awe Of your most private self, that self you spill Into the poems you keep locked away ... On his way home from India in 1947, MacNeice stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley ...”

“... Yale Law School, the ‘coolest thing I’ve done’. He attributes his success to old-fashioned self-discipline, which he learned at the feet of his grandmother, Mamaw, and perfected in the marines. Unlike those in his hometown who had kids young, or who were worn down by menial jobs, he fulfilled what he calls the American Dream. By the end of the book, he ...”

“... in the very different notion (although he sometimes runs them together) of mastering your self. When he first employs this formula, he uses it to refer to the thought – equally familiar to students of Plato and of Freud – that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself ...”

“... out of the Essays, you will remember the kidney stones. Montaigne insists on the veracity of his self-portrait. He writes, he declares, just the way he talks. To keep his book true to himself he will correct only the careless errors, not the habitual ones, so that ‘everyone recognises me in my book and my book in me.’ In a passage added late in life, he ...”

“... just as ambitious. She wanted to use scientific methods to analyse the inner workings of the self, to access the ‘direct sense of what was real in my internal universe’. The problem she wanted to solve in her diary was her own ‘blind fumbling with existence’, and by publishing it as a book she hoped it might be useful for other fumblers ...”

“... of our post-millennial times. Not my words, in fact, but the story’s, which with the streetwise self-reflexiveness of Post-Modernism anticipates, and so disarms, its own critique. At one point the narrator protests that ‘a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already impoverished reality,’ which ...”

“... about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me. Always Mr Plante is at my side: on his face ...”

“... than the other. American students did not. The extension to perceptions of people is almost self-evident. If members of one group think of themselves as a group and believe that members of another are more aggressive or sexy or lazy or cunning or whatever, they will assess them accordingly. Their own sense of themselves as a group is intrinsic to their ...”

“... of the writer that he can contemplate without feeling embarrassed by his conceit or ashamed at his self-indulgence. Rousseau is often accused of being self-indulgent even or especially when he is accusing himself of vile deeds: as when he tells how, to save his face, he lied about the theft of a ribbon and so got an honest ...”

“... its natural phenomena ‘were becoming his deepest source of solace’. Eddie is aware of ‘the self which, he felt sure, was in process of being born, and which was the reason he had chosen a manner of life on the whole distasteful to him’. An affair with Marcia, the owner’s wife, is followed by an episode with the station manager involving mutual ...”