I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
It wasn’t torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
I don’t really believe in evil at all.
However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we’re not a separate tribe.
What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
Oh, I’ve become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn’t this great race.
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.