Quotes from David Lodge

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.

To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The very danger in the situation is inseparable from the exhilaration it yields. You are strapped into your seat now, there is no way back, you have delivered yourself into the power of modern technology. You might as well lie back and enjoy it.

wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.

What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead

Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around

J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour.

Every decoding is another encoding.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket.

For some days, now, the termperature had wavered between freezing and thawing and it was difficult to tell whether the sediment thickening the atmostphere was rain or sleet or smog. Through the murk the dull red eye of a sun that had scarcely been able to drag itself above roof level all day was sinking blearily beneath the horizon, spreading a rusty stain across the snow-covered surfaces. Read pathetic fallacy weather.

We're a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self

When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person?

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.