23 quotes
'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
When a place is central to a good writer's imagination, it is because that place has become a metaphor for larger concerns.
introductory note (1984)
Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.
The Friday Book (1984)
We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them.
The Friday Book (1984)
A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
The story of our life is not our life. It is our story.
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.
The Floating Opera (1956)
[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people.
The Floating Opera (1956)
The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.
[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act.
The Floating Opera (1956)
I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology.
The Friday Book (1984)
[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces.
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination.
Further Fridays (1995)
The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness.
Further Fridays (1995)
[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
The Floating Opera (1956)
One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion.
The Friday Book (1984)