James Wood Quotes

#1. 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.

James Wood

#2. 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

James Wood

#3. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

James Wood

#4. 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.

James Wood

#5. 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.

James Wood

#6. 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.

James Wood

#7. 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.

James Wood

#8. 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.

James Wood

#9. 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.

James Wood

#10. 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.

James Wood

#11. 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.

James Wood

#12. 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.

James Wood

#13. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

James Wood

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

James Wood