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.