Nicholas Mosley Quotes

#1. It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is.

Nicholas Mosley

#2. To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.

Nicholas Mosley

#3. It is very difficult to love people who are good to us: it is easier to imagine we are loving people we can condescend to.

Nicholas Mosley

#4. Love is Noise.
Love is silence.
In love you're human.
In love you possess magical powers.
In love you shelter yourself.
In love, you expose yourself.

Nicholas Mosley

#5. I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.

Nicholas Mosley

#6. What if the need to have a hard time is built into human nature?

Nicholas Mosley

#7. After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

Nicholas Mosley

#8. Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash.

Nicholas Mosley

#9. It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

Nicholas Mosley

#10. The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity.

Nicholas Mosley

#11. If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell.

Nicholas Mosley

#12. Love is in prospect or retrospect, the present is ecstasy.

Nicholas Mosley

#13. I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

Nicholas Mosley

#14. There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious.

Nicholas Mosley

#15. The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...

Nicholas Mosley