Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly.
Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
Art begins with craft, and there is not art until craft has been mastered
Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
Animals will take love without demanding it; they have teeth, but they will not bite with the vindictiveness of human adults
Fiction deals with the external world, where things are coloured, and the fiction writer has to get the colours right
There is no art without cheating. That is why Plato and Tolstoy condemned literature
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
Catholicism is, in a paradox, a bigger thing than the faith. It is a kind of nationality one is stuck with forever. Or, rather, a supranationality that makes one despise small patriotisms
The short story stops as soon as it starts - a symphonic exposition with no development section, no recapitulation, no coda
The epic poem no longer exists - we are left with the novel, the only literary genre for failed symphonists
I have had too much experience with revenants to scoff at the living traces the dead leave behind. Ghosts walk, no doubt about it
Some scenes from one's past hug the mind with the force of a profound symbol impossible to read
This is what literature is meant to be--exploration without fear
If we take away plot, character, dialogue, even characters, we shall be left with something that is common to the most traditional and avant-garde novelist - a concern with interpreting, through the imagination, the flux of ordinary life; an attempt to understand, though not with the cold deliberation of the scientist, the nature of the external world and the mind that surveys it
He (James Joyce) is a modern novelist who has equipped our minds with the words and symbols we need in order to understand the contemporary world, and he will still be waiting to help when the fearsome future rolls in
Lawrence (D.H.) accepts life not with his brain but with his loins and bowels
His own personal tragdy was that he belonged to the dream and collapsed with it
Perhaps every dystopian vision is a figure of the present, with certain features sharpened and exaggerated to a point of moral and a warning
If Joyce is concerned with recording the highness of life, Beckett is obsessed with rendering its mysery. This is not perverseness, the deliberate grinding of the bad tooth; it is rather an attempt to discover what man is really like when he is stripped to show his essential condition, which is one of struggle against unheroic odds
Useless to hope to hold off the unavoidable happening with that frail barricade of week, day or hour which melts as it is made, for time himself will bring you in his high-powered car, rushing to it, whether you will or not
We who groan from drink or, showering, sing, believe the first of January can bring regeneration magically about both in our psyches and the world without
Coldly for a moment he saw that if there was to be love it must be love with advantage
