David Lodge Quotes & Sayings

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art. — David Lodge

Wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born. — David Lodge

Perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps — David Lodge

I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex — David Lodge

Information is the religion of the modern world. — David Lodge

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers. — David Lodge

Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad — David Lodge

WhhheeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! The scream of jet engines rises to a crescendo on the runways of the world. Every second, somewhere or other, a plane touches down, with a puff of smoke from scorched tyre rubber, or rises in the air, leaving a smear of black fumes dissolving in its wake. From space, the earth might look to a fanciful eye like a huge carousel, with planes instead of horses spinning round its circumference, up and down, up and down. Whhheeeeeeeeeee! — David Lodge

The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength. Inevitably, — David Lodge

Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun. — David Lodge

He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another ... Space is time. — David Lodge

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards. — David Lodge

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on. — David Lodge

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots ... — David Lodge

He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee. — David Lodge

But the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation. — David Lodge

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages. — David Lodge

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word. — David Lodge

Song-Mi Lee, ... her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought. — David Lodge

Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it. — David Lodge

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel cosiderable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy wanted to kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right). — David Lodge

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak. — David Lodge

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round. — David Lodge

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary. — David Lodge

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they're in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs. — David Lodge

(did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?). — David Lodge

So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stilmulating and sightly unnerving — David Lodge

What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted. — David Lodge

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind. — David Lodge

What?' he said. I'm sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he's got in the habit of saying 'what?' automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes. — David Lodge

That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen - fly me! — David Lodge

I could never feel like that about any public issue. Sometimes I wish I could. For me, if I'm honest, politics is background, news, almost entertainment. Something you switch on and off, like the TV. What I really worry about, what I can't switch off at will is, oh, sex, or dying or losing my hair. Private things. We're private people, aren't we, our generation? We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy are private. Live is private. Property is private. Parts are private. That's why the young radicals call for fucking in the streets. It's not just a cheap shock-tactic. It's a serious revolutionary proposition. — David Lodge

Every decoding is another encoding. — David Lodge

Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world. — David Lodge

I've been in love with you for weeks.'
There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'
Haven't you ever been in love, then?'
When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'
What the hell does that mean?'
We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language. — David Lodge

To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The very danger in the situation is inseparable from the exhilaration it yields. You are strapped into your seat now, there is no way back, you have delivered yourself into the power of modern technology. You might as well lie back and enjoy it. — David Lodge

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own - they even, for God's sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, 'I want to raise some questions about so-and-so', and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. — David Lodge

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing — David Lodge

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about — David Lodge

I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end. — David Lodge

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet. — David Lodge

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. — David Lodge

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase. — David Lodge

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces — David Lodge

What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead — David Lodge

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit. — David Lodge

It was said that the view through the open window above the urinal, straight across the Bay to the Silver Span, was the finest obtainable from such a position anywhere in the world, but today Philip kept his eyes down. Foreshortened, yes, definitely. — David Lodge