Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist’s or playwright’s.
Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.
Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone.
If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.
History is story, too. You don’t encounter her directly; you’ve only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.
In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.’ I’ve always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.
Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.
Reading…is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.
The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.