Postmodern Authors

"Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before. This is highly unnerving; fortunately, you're usually too busy laughing to go mad. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends"

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:"

"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand..."

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

"Gore is a man without an unconscious."

"What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space"

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my novels and short stories within or outside of some classification of Fantasy. For me, the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the patterns of symmetry, the network of images deposited around it as in the formation of a crystal." (The Uses of Literature, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 73)"

"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, [...] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; [...] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, [...] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss."

"Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits."

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

"And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines...."

"I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it."

"He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality."

"Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody."

"Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come."

"It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart."

"You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality,' and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas."

"Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive."

"Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men."

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."

"I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas."

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence."

"He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he."

"He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had."

"If you look at practically anyone - I mean, I find this more and more - the more you look at people the more you find that they've actually manufactured themselves. People whose names that you know. I meet lots of people in my ordinary life, away from writing, who seem to be authentic, who seem to know where they've come from and who they are, but anyone that I deal with in, if you like, my profession, we all seem to have made ourselves. I think artists are all self-made."

"Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think."

"Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories."

"The older I get, the more confused I get. I used to think that age would bring wisdom. It doesn't, it just brings confusion. But I find that this confusion is artistically useful. It's a kind of progression, a negative progression. It's moving into areas that you didn't know were there. It becomes more dreamlike all the time. When I was starting out as a novelist, I would have been furious if anyone said to me that novels are dream-like or that they're doing things the novelist didn't know he was doing. Now, I find that it's absolutely true."

"I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant."

"Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life."

"All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear."

"Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engages in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness."

"But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that the black is not still there."

"I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths."

"I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect."

"I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of."

"When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements."

"Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance."

"Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort."

"I would have failed, of course, but failure is the condition of the artist's life. What kind of failure would I have enjoyed, suffered? I know it was not all waste. My hopeless daubings taught me to look at the world with a painter's eye, despite the poor connection between eye and hand. And the smells of turpentine and linseed oil and paint-soaked rags still make my blood tingle. But words were my calling, and called to me, and I let fall the brush."

"Julian Gough's] notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument. We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora. But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him."

"I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen."

"It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface."

"I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do."

"Possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award."