Quotes from James Lasdun

I don't think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I'm not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it's not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety.

There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

What the Internet offers is this completely unfiltered transmission of thought to thought, of psyche to psyche, and whatever you're feeling, you can just sort of put it down and send it out there, and you can do it all in the confines of your room, without any actual contact.

For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically.

People are always in various stages of different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. One is always approaching the denouement of this or that subplot of one's life. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax.

Clearly I missed the story, I muttered.

And then finally there was that sense of almost supernatural kinship that exists often between people who seem on the surface quite unalike but whom life conspires to link by a succession of small affinities, creating a bond that exists in a world of its own, requiring neither comment nor confirmation in this world.

Everyone could work hard under the right conditions, and it was possible to enjoy hard work, even the most numbing, backbreaking toil. But you had to have a sense of participating in some greater good than just the maintaining of your own small existence; some human quorum or congregation of a size sufficient to align you with the world instead of against it. The imagination had to be fired, and kept alight. The heart had to feel the presence of joy and warmth. He

for a moment he seemed to see himself as if in a dreamlike film, surrounded by kindred spirits at the warm center of some bustling enterprise in which food, wine, starlight, warm breezes and the sounds of human conviviality combined like the elements of some ancient ceremony to plunge the parched spirit back into the flow of life's inexhaustible abundance.

He gave a peculiar smile. It seemed intended to be rueful, but some other emotion was hijacking it, warping it into something weirdly triumphant. You seemed pretty sure a month ago . . . I said. Well, you have to take a position, don't you? ...

I found it difficult to look at him at that moment.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.