76 quotes found
Writer · British · 1936–2023
British writer (1936–2023)
“This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But n...”
“You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.”
“But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.”
“That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.”
“She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or conde...”
“All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.”
“Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many wom...”
“She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.”
“But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the wo...”
“The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot b...”
“Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Que...”
“The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.”
“It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a bla...”
“She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedge...”
“You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo”
“He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, wh...”
