John Lanchester Quotes

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Sometimes you don't understand what you're going through until you're on the other side of it.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

Looking back on things, the view always improves.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time.

With time and experience comes a different perception of what's going on around you.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

Time puts things in proper perspective.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

There are some things I wish I never knew, but I am grateful for things that I have learned, too.

You usually can't tell what's inspiring until you look back on it.