Quotes from Scarlett Thomas

E, senza che apparentemente nessuno di noi abbia preso alcuna iniziativa, premiamo i nostri corpi l'uno contro l'altro, baciandoci come se fosse la mezzanotte in una festa alla fine del mondo.

going to sea is like going to prison with the added possibility of drowning.

One is a world of cold fact and reality; the other is a world of magic and adventure.

Some of the most friendly ghosts I live with are those of my favourite nineteenth-century science writers. Most of them were wrong, of course, but who cares? It's not like this is the end of history. We're all wrong.

Ulysses, which was an extremely difficult book by James Joyce. Every single other child in the class, when asked what they would like to do more of, chose creative writing.

Porridge. Coffee. A whole day of reading ahead of me. Things could be worse. I already have the sleepy feeling I get when I'm reading a good book: like I want to curl up in bed with it and forget about the nonfictional world.

Being a novelist meant she always anticipated the worst. It was her job to always think of dramatic things involving kidnaps and falling down mine-shafts and so on.

Authors can always be relied on to turn up late to their own launch party and then say embarrassing things, but they are a strangely valuable asset when it comes to promoting a publication. Their death, I find, is what adds most value to a book. I'm surprised publishers don't use the technique more often.

life, surely. And even doing that, the least wrong of

Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.

Oh, I've been around since the Greeks. Anyway, part of being a god is doing things to destroy yourself. It's like being a human. We're all trapped in the same economy.

This is why she can't get up. As long as she stays in bed everything's on hold.

There were also other, less significant spells working on Maximilian. Somewhere in the West a farmer had prayed for rain and so Maximilian, along with everyone else in the city, was breathing approximately 0.0000007 times faster than usual to create the moisture so requested. Such is the way of the world.

You are to imagine a Realworld room with three light bulbs in it. Outside the room are three electric switches. You may only enter the room once, and you may only have one switch on when you enter the room. How can you work out which switch operates which light?

Only in homeopathy do you get specific remedies for people who believe they are made of glass, have a delusion that they are selling green vegetables, or have an aptitude for, or a horror of, mathematics.

Someone who has the delusion Glass, is made of, does not literally believe herself to be made of glass but rather feels fragile and brittle, as if she might break. This might be someone who constantly thinks bad things are going to happen to her, or someone coming off drugs, perhaps, feeling she might break down.

We should have stories not to tell us how to live and turn our lives into copies of stories, but to prevent us from having to fictionalise ourselves".

After school, I walk to the bus stop in town, breathing the bonfirey, marshmallowy smells of autumn. I love this time of year, when people start to rehearse for Christmas plays and pantomimes, and the air feels like it's full of magic spells. This is the time of year when arriving home after school feels cosy, like going back to bed.

But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.

The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.

Jamie and the others come from a culture in which a fire alarm doesn't mean fire; it just means you get to go and stand outside and giggle for awhile. But a prawn or a peanut could still kill you.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.