David Lodge Quotes

#1. 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.

David Lodge

#2. 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,

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#4. 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

David Lodge

#5. Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

David Lodge

#6. 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.

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#9. But the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#11. 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.

David Lodge

#12. 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.

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#15. I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex

David Lodge

#16. Wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.

David Lodge

#17. He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.

David Lodge

#18. 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.

David Lodge

#19. 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.

David Lodge

#20. 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

David Lodge

#21. 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

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#23. It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about

David Lodge

#24. Information is the religion of the modern world.

David Lodge

#25. 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.

David Lodge

#26. That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen - fly me!

David Lodge

#27. 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.

David Lodge

#28. 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.

David Lodge

#29. I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

David Lodge

#30. 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

David Lodge

#31. 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.

David Lodge

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

David Lodge

#33. Every decoding is another encoding.

David Lodge

#34. Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.

David Lodge