Quotes from Nicholas Royle

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.

There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.

I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.

In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

Deconstruction wouldn't make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

A text always remains in crucial ways 'imperceptible'.

A text is a 'fabric of traces' governed by a logic of the 'nonpresent remainder', by what thus figures the impossibility of pure presence, the impossibility of absolute plenitude of meaning or intention.

A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.

Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something 'maddening' about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.

Derrida encourages us to be especially wary of the notion of the centre. We cannot get by without a concept of the centre, perhaps, but if one were looking for a single 'central idea' for Derrida's work it might be that of decentring.

What one repeatedly finds in Derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all of his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happens to be at issue. 'Deconstruction' is perhaps the best-known word for this.

Even the most apparently simple statement is subject to fission or fissure.

Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.

In order to be what it 'is', a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.