Mrs. P.? Oh, no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Be, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff. . .” The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again.

— Paul Murray

Never trust an Italian. The Nazis did that, and look where it got them.

— Paul Murray

None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in—which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it.

— Paul Murray

None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly canine trips and stumbles, disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot dog from the hand of a small boy.

— Paul Murray

People don't want the truth,' he says, waving a hand at the surrounding streets. 'They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.

— Paul Murray

Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love to bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?

— Paul Murray

So this is the boom, eh?” I said. “Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?” “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said glumly. “It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.” He pulled heavily on his cigarette. “The whole thing’ll come crashing down,” he said bleakly, “and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

— Paul Murray

THE ACCURSED SHIP didn’t sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dog face die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavor! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I had been violated; violated by a team of accountants. Laura, prostrated by grief, lay weeping on my lap. Frank stared stolidly at the credits, over which, as a coup de grâce, a cat or cats were being strangled to the effect that “My Heart Will Go On,” which at this moment in time was not a sentiment I could endorse.

— Paul Murray

The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently of the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.

— Paul Murray

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas—to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us

— Paul Murray