Quotes from James Wood

My parents loved each other. I was raised in a house of total love and respect. My dad worked very hard and my mother was incredibly devoted to him. I can unequivocally, without any peradventure of doubt, tell you that I was raised with the kind of love that we only dream of.

I'm famous for being nicer to my fans than anyone on the face of the earth because I figure, a) They pay my salary, and b) It's probably like a big moment in your life to meet somebody so I would say, 'Just come on up.'

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.

When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real , which is at the bottom of my inquiries.

Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier, more marked, as it disappears.

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil." With literary belief, however, "one is always free to choose not to believe." This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its "reality.

Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves.

The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her—when we reach "huddled" we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author's magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried.

The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.

fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.

They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife.

is there so much suffering, so much death? I was told that God's ways are incomprehensible, and that in many cases, a Job-like humility

Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford's words—a "medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.

Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator's unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably

This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character's eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person narrator's). 11

Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.

There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape—or more accurately, nothing but its present—until it has its ending; and then suddenly the whole trajectory is visible.

Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing

The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.

Sometimes, it is almost frightening to realise how poorly most people know themselves; it seems to put one at an almost priestly advantage over people's souls.