13 quotes found
“Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.”
“We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.”
“an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.”
“When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands...”
“Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative...”
“Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occu...”
“We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”
“What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that th...”
“there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?”
“We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by ...”
“The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motiva...”
“For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many...”
“Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them. . . . mediation, keeping a distance from the actual events and bei...”
