Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, J. G. Ballard on "The Art of Fiction, No. 85" (1984):
...I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work ... I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

...for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality...

...if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels. But I’m not sure if that’s decadence or simply an attempt to invert and reverse the commonplace, to turn the sock inside out. I’ve always been intrigued by inversions of that kind, or any kind.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements. By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people’s pigeons. I wouldn’t recommend it.

With short stories I do a brief synopsis of about a page, and only if I feel the story works as a story, as a dramatic narrative with the right shape and balance to grip the reader’s imagination, do I begin to write it.... In the case of the novels, the synopsis is much longer. For High-Rise, it was about twenty-five thousand words, written in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block, an extended case history. I wish I’d kept it; I think it was better than the novel. In the case of The Unlimited Dream Company, I spent a full year writing a synopsis that was eventually about seventy thousand words long, longer than the eventual novel. In fact, I was cutting down and pruning the synopsis as I wrote the novel. By synopsis I don’t mean a rough draft, but a running narrative in the perfect tense with the dialogue in reported speech, and with an absence of reflective passages and editorializing.

...I haven’t taken any drugs since one terrifying LSD trip in 1967. A nightmarish mistake. It opened a vent of hell that took years to close and left me wary even of aspirin.... It convinced me that a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind. (I take it that beyond LSD there lies nothing.) Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points, and more than equal to any physical rearrangement of the brain’s functions.

The sixties were a time of endlessly multiplying possibilities, of real selflessness in many ways, a huge network of connections between Vietnam and the space race, psychedelia and pop music, linked together in every conceivable way by the media landscape. We were all living inside an enormous novel, an electronic novel, governed by instantaneity. In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set of endlessly proliferating presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future. The hands of the clock now go nowhere.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Margaret Atwood on "The Art of Fiction, No. 121" (1990):
In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

We have fallen very much into the habit of judging books by their covers. “Authenticity” has become a concern. I tend to side with creative freedom. Everyone should write as she or he feels impelled. Then let’s judge the results, not the picture of the author on the back flap.

The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper. But everyone “writes” in a way; that is, each person has a “story”—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again. The significant points in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at twenty is seen as comedy or nostalgia at forty. All children “write.” (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

All writers feel struck by the limitations of language. All serious writers.

The novel is not merely a vehicle for self-expression or for the rendition of one’s own personal life. I’m quite conservative in that way. I do see the novel as a vehicle for looking at society—an interface between language and what we choose to call reality, although even that is a very malleable substance. When I create characters in novels, those characters aren’t necessarily expressing something that is merely personal.

I think the focus [of my work] has become wider, but surely that happens with every writer. What you do first is learn your craft. That can take years. In order to do that, you have to pick subjects that are small enough for you to handle. You learn how to do a good job with that. Of course, in the larger sense, every novel is—at the beginning—the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space. I mean, it’s just as terrifying every time. But nevertheless, having made the journey a few times, you have little guideposts, little signposts in the back of your mind.

I still get a few young folks who want to make their reputations by shooting me down. Any writer who has been around for a while gets a certain amount of that. I was very intolerant as a youthful person. It’s almost necessary, that intolerance; young people need it in order to establish credentials for themselves.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Anthony Burgess on "The Art of Fiction, No. 48" (1973):
[The afternoon is] a quiet time. It’s a time when one’s body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive—the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness.

I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

I do feel that the author has to know best about what he’s writing—from the viewpoint of structure, intention, and so on. The critic has the job of explaining deep-level elements which the author couldn’t know about. As for saying where—technically, in matters of taste and so on—a writer is going wrong, the critic rarely says what the author doesn’t know already.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.... I chart a little first—list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture, especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition, and it often elevates ignorance into a virtue. Think of the musically illiterate who set themselves up as “arrangers.” And youth is so conformist, so little concerned with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure that it and it alone knows.

[Y]ou can’t be a genius and sexually impotent. I still think that inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact, a work of craft.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

One has to wait, I’m afraid—a long time sometimes—for the experience one’s had to present itself in workable form, as a form that can be shaped into something like a work of art.

I think there’s more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness.

Literature ... thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties.

I don’t ... think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life’s problems is.

Comedy is concerned with truth quite as much as tragedy; and the two, as Plato recognized, have something fundamental in common. They’re both stripping processes; they both tear off externals and show man as a poor forked animal. Satire is a particular kind of comedy, limiting itself to particular areas of behavior, not to the general human condition.

I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, John Fowles on "The Art of Fiction, No. 109" (1989):
...it’s often through personal diaries — however embarrassing they are to read now — that the novelist discovers his true bent — that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest.

Students nowadays seem to want to “place” precisely, to locate precisely, everything about a writer’s work: what he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems to me that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about writing.... [I]t is very important we stay free.

This relation, between man and nature, is far more important and real to me than that between man and God, even between man and other men. I also find it intensely pleasurable, endlessly rich. Men often bore, books often bore, all things human can bore; nature, never.

That ours is in general a heroic age seems to me ridiculous. We are near stifling and exterminating our planet. What scientific and technological advances we have made are flagrantly not paralleled by any moral or ethical ones. By and large men are never moral; they always let themselves be pressured into the amoral or the immoral. In terms of history men have failed; it is time we tried Eve.