Quotes from Russell Hoban

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don't go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business.

Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it werent you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.

We can't all be investigating non-coding DNA," I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. "Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses

A frightening thought had been growing in me. I'd always assumed that I was the central character in my own story but now it occurred to me that I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else's.

O what we ben! And what we come to!

There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

Life is a process of one goneness after another.

Explorers have to be ready to die lost.

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. . . Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.

A family is everybody all together.

Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?.

I'll never retire. They'll have to take my computer out of my cold, dead hands. I'm addicted to writing. I feel physically unwell if I'm not doing it.

There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don't make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

Usually my starting point is something that I've seen. It might be a painting, it might be an object. But they always start from a definite sensory experience.

But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.