Norman Lock Quotes

#1. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

Norman Lock

#2. Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.

Norman Lock

#3. In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

Norman Lock

#4. Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

Norman Lock

#5. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

Norman Lock

#6. Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

Norman Lock

#7. My mathematics is helpless against the sea.

Norman Lock

#8. Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

Norman Lock

#9. I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.

Norman Lock

#10. I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

Norman Lock

#11. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Norman Lock

#12. What was not possessed of the 'fat light'--an immanence that shed radiance over the world of gross matter--should be left to the portraitists of sausage-shaped ladies and their rich consorts.

Norman Lock

#13. A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

Norman Lock

#14. For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

Norman Lock

#15. I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

Norman Lock

#16. I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

Norman Lock

#17. What is a good man if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? ... He was asked to bear what cannot be borne--what should not be borne. I hope never to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.

Norman Lock

#18. I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

Norman Lock

#19. I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Norman Lock

#20. I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me.

Norman Lock

#21. I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

Norman Lock

#22. I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

Norman Lock

#23. To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.

Norman Lock

#24. My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

Norman Lock

#25. We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.

Norman Lock

#26. When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

Norman Lock

#27. Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

Norman Lock

#28. Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

Norman Lock

#29. Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

Norman Lock

#30. I hammered on the Poes' front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn't say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy.

Norman Lock

#31. It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

Norman Lock

#32. I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

Norman Lock

#33. For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

Norman Lock

#34. Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novel. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked.

Norman Lock

#35. As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy.

Norman Lock

#36. Hatred is unattractive, but it's also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they'd admit it's a stronger passion than lust.

Norman Lock

#37. The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

Norman Lock

#38. I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else.

Norman Lock

#39. Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

Norman Lock

#40. I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

Norman Lock