I’m just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money, and they think it’s all okay because it’s just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they’re bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.

— Paul Murray

I only meant, you know, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on imbeciles. I know how hard it is to find the right person, but that’s no reason to exhaustively work your way through all the wrong people. You seem to be living your romantic life by some kind of process of elimination. It’s like matching a Louis Equator armchair with one of those plastic patio tables. It simply doesn’t work.” “Oh, I see,” Be said. “I’m an armchair, is that it?” “A Louis Equator armchair,” I qualified. “And my boyfriends are patio tables.” “Actually,” I remembered, “this one’s more like one of those self-assembly Swedish wardrobes.

— Paul Murray

I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat.

— Paul Murray

It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent terror?’‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.

— Paul Murray

It used to be the smartest people didn't always want to be the richest people.

— Paul Murray

Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.” “You’re talking like a Stalinist!” I cried. “People don’t get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever’s left over to buy themselves nice things that make them feel less bad about having jobs!

— Paul Murray

Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor, and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us.

— Paul Murray

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor, and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, it's our own expectations that crush us.

— Paul Murray

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor, and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us." -- from Skippy Dies

— Paul Murray

Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstore, except it got broken up into a million different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....

— Paul Murray