Tim Parks Quotes

#1. We knocked lightly on the door. A voice asked who we might be, for nobody will ever open in Italy until identity is declared. Security, even in the remotest villages, is at New York standards.

Tim Parks

#2. The city's government seized and sold Church property until the

Tim Parks

#3. It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

Tim Parks

#4. With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

Tim Parks

#5. What wonderful minds we have, even though they don't seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.

Tim Parks

#6. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long
ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it.
It's only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement
inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when
there is no enjoyment.

Tim Parks

#7. Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

Tim Parks

#8. In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.

Tim Parks

#9. People want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.

Tim Parks

#10. He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yet, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.

Tim Parks

#11. Life presents itself first and foremost as a task. We take no pleasure in it except when we are striving after something.

Tim Parks

#12. To recount modern life one has to have characters with iPads and smart phones who take trains and planes, and to be aware how this alters consciousness, identity, and the kind of experiences people have. They are constantly exposed to contact from everyone they know and many they don't.

Tim Parks

#13. What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

Tim Parks

#14. Always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed ... Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write 'splendid,' but also, 'I don't believe a word of it.' And even 'bullshit.'

Tim Parks

#15. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

Tim Parks

#16. When despair brings home the bacon and self-esteem with it, it's hard to let it go. 'When you are suffering enough,' I suggested, 'I mean so much that it's simply impossible to go on, then something will give and the stories will change, like it or not.

Tim Parks

#17. All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

Tim Parks

#18. And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.

Tim Parks

#19. The story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller's way of organizing his own life.

Tim Parks

#20. Italy is not a country for beginners.

Tim Parks

#21. Rather than a situation where people are naturally finding themselves reading the same thing and then talking about it, some readers are responding to celebrity in the hope that what they read will enable them to join an international conversation.

Tim Parks

#22. Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.

Tim Parks

#23. You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect.

Tim Parks

#24. The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now.

Tim Parks

#25. The fact is, as soon as you start with words you're locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before.

Tim Parks

#26. But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry.

Tim Parks