Famous Quotes & Sayings

James Wood Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 21 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James Wood.

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Famous Quotes By James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1680820

Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 240290

Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 385224

Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 190476

Sometimes, it is almost frightening to realise how poorly most people know themselves; it seems to put one at an almost priestly advantage over people's souls. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1089925

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1954380

They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 187278

There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape - or more accurately, nothing but its present - until it has its ending; and then suddenly the whole trajectory is visible. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1908235

Is there so much suffering, so much death? I was told that God's ways are incomprehensible, and that in many cases, a Job-like humility — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1849332

The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her - when we reach "huddled" we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author's magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1377186

The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 1326544

In [James Kelman's story] 'The Third Man, or Else the Fourth,' four men stand around a fire, on a freezing day. They appear to be out of work, and very poor. They talk about politics, about an old man who was recently found dead in a cold tenement building, about prison. One of the men, Arthur, starts describing a dream he had. Like most dreams, it is incomprehensible; it gathers pace, and we are drawn into it, and then it fizzles out. Kelman makes a funny, implicit connection between maintaining the fire (the narrator goes off to get "burnables") and maintaining a story: everything is potentially burnable, everything can be used. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 927126

When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 823778

Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier, more marked, as it disappears. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 694525

The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place. — James Wood

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Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 656921

Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998) — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 650173

although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete - we hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death, in the way that Blanchot described actual life. "Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was." That is the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Loser," describing his friend Wertheimer, who has committed suicide. But it might also describe the tense in which we encounter most fictional lives: we say, "She was," not "She is." He left the house, she rubbed her neck, she put down her book and went to sleep. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 485288

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil." With literary belief, however, "one is always free to choose not to believe." This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its "reality. — James Wood

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Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 265908

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking. — James Wood

James Wood Quotes 242154

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood