Quotes from David Lodge

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

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

He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another.... Space is time.

but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, aposiopesis, the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.

I wondered whether, if Kierkegaard had been a Catholic, they would have made him a saint by now, and built a basilica over his grave. He would make a good patron saint of neurotics.

What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted.

did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?).

So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stilmulating and sightly unnerving

Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun.

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting jazz and scat, as in scat-singing, to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word.

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet.

What?' he said. I'm sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he's got in the habit of saying 'what?' automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes.

It was said that the view through the open window above the urinal, straight across the Bay to the Silver Span, was the finest obtainable from such a position anywhere in the world, but today Philip kept his eyes down. Foreshortened, yes, definitely.

Song-Mi Lee,...her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.

Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.

Una curva de la calle puso ante su vista el campanario de la catedral de Westminster, la forma fálica más descarada del horizonte londinense.

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they're in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

Niciodata n-am visat mult. Ceea ce inseamna din cate inteleg ca pur si simplu nu-mi amintesc visele, fiindca de visat visam tot timpul cat dormim sau cel putin asa se spune. E ca si cum as avea un televizor la care nu se uita nimeni si care imi palpaie in cap cat e noaptea de lunga. Canalul viselor. As vrea sa pot sa trag toata chestia asta pe video. Poate ca atunci mi-as da cat de cat seama ce se intampla cu mine. Si nu ma refer la genunchi, ci la cap. La minte. La suflet.

Cica in fiecare grasan se afla cate-un slabanog care se lupta sa iasa la lumina, iar eu unul ii aud strigatele inabusite ori de cate ori ma uit in oglinda.

Art for art's sake but money for Christ's sake.

The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength. Inevitably