Nicholas Mosley Quotes & Sayings

What if the need to have a hard time is built into human nature? — Nicholas Mosley

I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is. — Nicholas Mosley

The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity. — Nicholas Mosley

But had I not cut the cord? and now was I seeing what happens when there is no gravity. There is indeed nothing, nothing; you are just falling. My father had said once (or was it you?) that the only emotions worth having are ecstasy and despair. I thought - Well yes, but there is also a terror at this nothing. — Nicholas Mosley

The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own... — Nicholas Mosley

Love is in prospect or retrospect, the present is ecstasy. — Nicholas Mosley

If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell. — Nicholas Mosley

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels. — Nicholas Mosley

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it. — Nicholas Mosley

It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is. — Nicholas Mosley

Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash. — Nicholas Mosley

There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious. — Nicholas Mosley

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative. — Nicholas Mosley

It is very difficult to love people who are good to us: it is easier to imagine we are loving people we can condescend to. — Nicholas Mosley

To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative. — Nicholas Mosley

Love is Noise.
Love is silence.
In love you're human.
In love you possess magical powers.
In love you shelter yourself.
In love, you expose yourself. — Nicholas Mosley