Top 45 Thomas C. Foster Quotes
#1. Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.
Thomas C. Foster
#2. When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.
Thomas C. Foster
#3. Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.
Thomas C. Foster
#4. Never feel dumb. Not knowing who or what is no sin. Ignorance is simply the measure of what you haven't got to yet. I find writers and works every day that I haven't got to, haven't even heard of.
Thomas C. Foster
#6. If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.
Thomas C. Foster
#7. So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
Thomas C. Foster
#8. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?
Thomas C. Foster
#9. Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.
Thomas C. Foster
#10. Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.
Thomas C. Foster
#12. Reading ... is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.
Thomas C. Foster
#13. The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved.
Thomas C. Foster
#14. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
Thomas C. Foster
#15. Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature. Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since.
Thomas C. Foster
#16. A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."
Thomas C. Foster
#18. History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.
Thomas C. Foster
#19. IRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand.
Thomas C. Foster
#20. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.
Thomas C. Foster
#21. Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.
Thomas C. Foster
#22. Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.
Thomas C. Foster
#23. Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.
Thomas C. Foster
#24. We accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Thomas C. Foster
#25. And we feel that those characters couldn't be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland.
Thomas C. Foster
#27. The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.
Thomas C. Foster
#28. Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives - not just novels, but narratives generally - since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
Thomas C. Foster
#29. We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.
Thomas C. Foster
#30. A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning.
Thomas C. Foster
#31. Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.
Thomas C. Foster
#32. Corollaries - where have I seen his face, don't I know that
Thomas C. Foster
#34. characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be
Thomas C. Foster
#35. So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.
Thomas C. Foster
#36. A novel is a made-up work about made-up people in a made-up place, all of which is very real.
Thomas C. Foster
#37. Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
Thomas C. Foster
#39. T here's no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet.
Thomas C. Foster
#40. The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again
Thomas C. Foster
#43. If to get to the finish line the hero must walk over a sea of bodies, then so be it. He can die at said line, but he's got to get there.
Thomas C. Foster
#44. In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
Thomas C. Foster
#45. Real people are made out of a whole lot of things - flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
Thomas C. Foster
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