It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.
Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything...
A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of...
He always told them the same thing, to begin with. ‘Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let a...
God, said Benedict Fludd, your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible—laughable, laughable—and the next, he is imperious. He stopped. He said It is li...
All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which be there - in this case the a...
A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplifica...
What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ance...
There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another...
Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction in...
She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had...
Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced b...
Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its anima...
How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
Good writing is always new.
Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her pare...
But poets don't want homes -- do they? -- they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.
All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable.
Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settle...