Fantasy Authors

"I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did."

"In Reading [England] there is this thing called the IDR, short for "Inner Distribution Road", which is bureaucratese for "Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently". It's a 2-3 lane dual carriageway that goes round the town centre. It has lots of roundabouts, an overhead section, a couple of spare motorway-like exits (that's British motorways -- y'know, the roundabout with the main road going under it), and a thing called the Watlington Street Gyratory, where you have to get in lane for your intended destination about three years and two corners before you get there with no signposting. I used to cycle along it every day to get to school, before I fell off at 35 mph. [Kids! Don't try this at home!] I know it well. I believe it is impossible to leave Reading heading west."

"I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind..."

"Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution."

"He is so corrupt that he would willingly pay for the pleasure of selling himself."

"For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act. They are hampered by mistrust of themselves, daunted by the fear of giving offence; besides, deep feelings of affection are like respectable women; they are afraid of being found out and they go through life with downcast eyes."

"Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises où l'on échoue."

"Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!"

"[L'Éducation sentimentale displays Flaubert's] nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both meticulous and alive."

"The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible."

"The archaeological question, as far as the reconstruction attempted in Salammbô is concerned, has long been resolved. The work has no archaeological value whatsoever, and Flaubert is here a hundred cubits below Anacharsis himself. His rather considerable research was not useless to him, far from it, for he was guided by a sense of the picturesque and knew how to pinpoint everything that would allow him to create beautiful images, but the incomplete list of his errors has been sufficiently compiled so that we should not be misled by Frœhner's otherwise very lively letter. The same cannot be said of the very remarkable historical sense he demonstrates. The idea he gives of Carthage is accurate. He has precisely grasped the causes of its greatness and its weakness. He has expressed them in a historical style of perfect solidity, clarity, and authority. This style has as its body the intelligent, condensed and almost epigrammatic force of Voltaire and Montesquieu, and as its soul a disciplined oratorical breath à la Chateaubriand."

"La question archéologique, en ce qui concerne la restitution tentée dans Salammbô, est résolue depuis longtemps. La valeur archéologique de l'ouvrage est nulle, et Flaubert se trouve ici à cent coudées au-dessous dAnacharsis lui-même. Son travail de recherches, assez considérable, ne lui a pas été inutile, loin de là, car il y était guidé par le sens du pittoresque, et savait tomber au juste sur tout ce qui devait lui permettre de belles images, mais la liste incomplète de ses erreurs a été suffisamment dressée pour que nous ne nous en laissions pas imposer par la lettre, d'ailleurs très verveuse, à Frœhner. Il n'en est pas de même du sens historique très remarquable dont il fait preuve. L'idée qu'il donne de Carthage est juste. Il a saisi avec exactitude les causes de sa grandeur et de sa faiblesse. Il les a exprimées dans un style historique d'une solidité, d'une netteté, d'une autorité parfaites. Ce style a pour corps la force intelligente, condensée et comme épigrammatique de Voltaire et de Montesquieu, et pour âme un souffle oratoire discipliné à la Chateaubriand."

"Thus Flaubert has two quite different conceptions of himself. One is at the level of banal description, for example when he writes to his mistress Louise: ‘What am I? Am I intelligent or am I stupid? Am I sensitive or am I stolid? Am I mean or am I generous? Am I selfish or am I selfless? I have no idea, I suppose I am like everyone else, I waver between all these. . . .’ In other words, at this level he is completely lost. Why? Because none of these notions has any meaning in themselves. They only acquire a meaning from inter-subjectivity, in other words what I have called in the Critique the ‘objective spirit’ within which each member of a group or society refers to himself and appears to others, establishing relations of interiority between persons which derive from the same information or the same context. Yet one cannot say that Flaubert did not have, at the very height of his activity, a comprehension of the most obscure origins of his own history. He once wrote a remarkable sentence: ‘You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths’—les mêmes profondeurs terribles et ennuyeuses. What could be a better formula for the whole world of psychoanalysis, in which one makes terrifying discoveries, yet which always tediously come to the same thing? His awareness of these depths was not an intellectual one. He later wrote that he often had fulgurating intuitions, akin to a dazzling bolt of lightning in which one simultaneously sees nothing and sees everything. Each time they went out, he tried to retrace the paths revealed to him by this blinding light, stumbling and falling in the subsequent darkness."

"I want to think that every character is a little-I guess like Flaubert saying "Emma Bovary, c'est moi"-that I am the characters but the characters aren't me"

"Madame Bovary is written entirely according to the system of tanka. Flaubert wrote it so slowly and painstakingly, because he had to begin it anew after every fifth word."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"I see now, looking at this little book, November, by Flaubert, so many of the themes that he was going to explore so wonderfully later are just touched upon, he didn’t have the skill to carry them any further. And then, as his life went by, he followed them, he followed these dark tunnels."

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."

"L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout"

"Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity. (10 May 1867)"

"Notre ignorance de l'histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps."

"Tout le rêve de la démocratie est d'élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois."

"Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)"

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. (14 August 1853)"

"You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it. (14 June 1853)"

"J'ai eu, aussi, moi, mon époque nerveuse, mon époque sentimentale, et j'en porte encore, comme un galérien, la marque au cou. Avec ma main brûlée j'ai le droit maintenant d'écrire des phrases sur la nature du feu."

"The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence. (11 December 1852)"

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (9 December 1852)"

"One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier. (22 October 1846)"

"Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?"

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. (13 August 1846)"

"One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form. (12 August 1846)"

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

"There is no 'true'. There are merely ways of perceiving truth."

"The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!""

"What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it."

"Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres."

"Toutes les histoires anciennes, comme le disait un de nos beaux esprits, ne sont que des fables convenues."

"From Kapila, the Hindu philosopher, who many centuries before Christ demurred to the claim of the mystic Yogins, that in ecstasy a man has the power of seeing Deity face to face and conversing with the " highest" beings, down to the Voltaireans of the eighteenth century, who laughed at everything that was held sacred by other people, each age had its unbelieving Thomases. p. 121"

"Of no writer can it be said with greater truth that the half is greater than the whole. His histories may still be studied as models of balanced and lucid narrative. His letters hold an honoured place even among the greatest. Above all, his fame rests securely upon his two stories, Zadig and Candide, those little masterpieces of swift irony and crystal-clear criticism which, in a hundred and fifty years, have lost not one spark of their brilliance, and which will perish only with the death of the French tongue. If we might give to Voltaire and Diderot two books apiece, and exclude the erudition which was their pride, they would stand unchallenged in their century. Candide and Zadig are still supreme, and what but they are worthy to be set on the same shelf with the Neveu de Rameau and the Paradoxe?"

"Contrary to Voltaire's sarcasm, the Creator does not resemble his creature."

"People like Voltaire or Euripides are no one's idea of profound thinkers, and yet, in scarcely more than a generation, the immortal gods succumb to their attacks as meekly as dew to the sun."

"There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote."

"O Voltaire! O humaneness! O nonsense! There is something about "truth", about the search for truth; and when a human being is too human about it- "il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"- I bet he finds nothing."

"I must give you a piece of intelligence that you perhaps already know—namely, that the ungodly arch-villain Voltaire has died miserably like a dog—just like a brute. That is his reward!"

"By excluding the intolerants from the scope of tolerance, Voltaire reduced tolerance to an empty box. Worse, he prepared the atrocities of the Terror of the French Revolution, which was in turn the model of Communist terror. Millions were killed by proclaiming they had no right to tolerance because they were themselves intolerant. …The dramatic mistake of Voltaire should be corrected by proclaiming that religions and philosophies have [the] right to be in different ways intolerant, and should still be tolerated."

"Voltaire's keen laughter must be heard before Samson could strike with the headsman's axe. Yet Voltaire's laugh proved nothing ; it produced only a brutal effect, just as did Samson's base axe. Voltaire could only wound the body of Christianity. All his sarcasms derived from ecclesiastical history ; all his witticisms on dogma and worship, on the Bible, that most sacred book of humanity, on the Virgin Mary, that fairest flower of poetry; the whole dictionary of philosophical arrows which he discharged against the clergy and the priesthood, could only wound the mortal body of Christianity, but were powerless against its interior essence, its deeper spirit, its immortal soul."

"Jésus a pleuré, Voltaire a souri; c'est de cette larme divine et de ce sourire humain qu'est faite la douceur de la civilisation actuelle."

"To name Voltaire is to characterize the whole eighteenth century."