Quotes from Tim Parks

In general, though, one should never forget the role money plays in shaping the writer's life, and the life inevitably informs the work. My own position is that I always want to convince a publisher to give me adequate money for what I want to do. At the same time, what I want to do is to arrive at full expression in a way that seduces, that pleases people in a way they didn't expect to be pleased, or even want to be pleased.

I laughed and discovered something that has served me well since: the more we threaten thought and language with silence, or simply seek to demote them in our lives from the ludicrous pedestal on which our culture and background have placed them, then the more fertile, in their need to justify and assert themselves, they become. Reflection is never more exciting than when reflecting on the damage reflection does, language never more seductive than when acknowledging its unreality.

Government and unions have negotiated a minimum service to be maintained during strikes.

Rather than a situation where people are naturally finding themselves reading the same thing and then talking about it, some readers are responding to celebrity in the hope that what they read will enable them to join an international conversation.

However reluctant Italians are to embrace a multiracial society, the old antipathy to government and authority works in favor of the illegal alien.

Prepare for surprises in the second part, where everything changes so that much can remain the same.

What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

A big gloomy space was piled with bags, boxes, suitcases, parcels, umbrellas. There were a few shelves but no apparent order. Some of the bags seemed to have been left where they had been dropped. It was the sort of place horror-film directors dream of, or playwrights of the absurd, a place of the soul, in limbo.

To recount modern life one has to have characters with iPads and smart phones who take trains and planes, and to be aware how this alters consciousness, identity, and the kind of experiences people have. They are constantly exposed to contact from everyone they know and many they don't.

When despair brings home the bacon and self-esteem with it, it's hard to let it go. 'When you are suffering enough,' I suggested, 'I mean so much that it's simply impossible to go on, then something will give and the stories will change, like it or not.

The fact is, as soon as you start with words you're locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before.

And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.

It was to be, and still is, an absolute staple of the Italian railways, whether public or private, that in some way or other, acknowledged or unacknowledged, they were/ are being paid for, or hugely subsidized, by the state, a state that was/ is itself greatly in debt.

T]hese three days of meditation have revealed to me that every thought I think is, in one way or another, an ugly, fatuous form of self-congratulation. Even what appears to be the most searing self-criticism is in fact self-congratulation. A man capable of seeing his worst side, you congratulate yourself. Coetzee is pleased to have been so hard on himself.

All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

It was possible we looked out of sorts. And of course we were aware by now that Italians don't drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste.

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease.

Si te liberas de esa compulsión, pensó Paul de pronto, si escapas de esa necesidad de engatusar y convencer y seducir, lo que quede después serás tú, tu verdadero ser.

Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies.

The Grand Hotel Milano had become a five-star hamster wheel.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

What wonderful minds we have, even though they don't seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.