Quotes from Tim Parks

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

Life presents itself first and foremost as a task. We take no pleasure in it except when we are striving after something.

It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It's only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment.

For my own part, I can't help thinking that while the trend away from formal discipline is clearly general across the Western world, no people is perhaps as perplexed as the Italians with the whole problem of how to make a child do what it does not want to do. Perhaps because Italian parents so rarely find any good reason for not doing what they want to do.

And I think, one of the reasons I've stayed in Italy is that I believe, perhaps erroneously, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps merely in reaction to my own childhood of church bells and rainy weekends - I do believe that kids have a better time here, that adolescence is more fun here. Certainly I never saw a group of people so confident and at ease with themselves and their youth. I wish it for my children.

In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.

people want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.

the story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller's way of organizing his own life.

There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else.

In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It's an enviable mind-set.

So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by

But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry.

Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday's vision of the future.

Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. 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.

it was through constructing a network of railways across some of Europe's most arduous terrain that the newly formed Italian nation won a reputation for ingenuity and adventurous construction projects.

More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation-state could be reconstructed through an account of the country's railways.

the city's government seized and sold Church property until the

In America the lack of investment in train travel speaks eloquently of a country always ready to appear righteous but pathologically averse to surrendering car and plane for a more eco-friendly, community-conscious form of mobility.

It makes the nation possible and allows it to remain fragmented, allows people to live double lives.

The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now.

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.