David Lodge

“...my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket.”

“Our friends started life with too many beliefs -- the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones -- what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? -- they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief...it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.”

“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”

“We’re a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self”

“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”

“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”

“Every decoding is another encoding.”

“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...”

“The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for him or herself. Repetition and simplicity worked (usually) for Hemingway's artistic purposes. Variation and decoration worked for Nabokov's, especially in Lolita. This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a "nymphet", leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its first publication, and still disturbs, because it gives a seductive eloquence to a child-abuser and murderer. As Humbert Humbert himself says, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

“What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.”

“The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.”

“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.”

“J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others.”

“It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam.”

“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”

“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”

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

“but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.”

“wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.”

“When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person? ”

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

“Information is the religion of the modern world.”

“Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.”

“Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.”

“He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round.”