Lasdun's Quotes

#1. I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Anthony Hecht

#2. Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

#3. There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

James Lasdun

#4. The nature of fiction is to make one distrustful of any character who lectures and castigates.

James Lasdun

#5. For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically.

James Lasdun

#6. Life is divine chaos.

Jillian Dodd

#7. I don't think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I'm not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it's not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety.

James Lasdun

#8. I am not a supporter of Israel's military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist.

James Lasdun

#9. I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

James Lasdun

#10. What the Internet offers is this completely unfiltered transmission of thought to thought, of psyche to psyche, and whatever you're feeling, you can just sort of put it down and send it out there, and you can do it all in the confines of your room, without any actual contact.

James Lasdun

#11. Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)

Jack Kerouac

#12. I had no idea what the future held or what waited for me at the end of this grueling journey and yet, somehow, I wasn't miserable. I'd been lonely my whole life, but I'd never been truly alone before, and it wasn't nearly as scary as I'd imagined.

Leigh Bardugo

#13. The subject under discussion, economics, purports to be a science. It

John Lanchester

#14. One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe!

Alice Walker

#15. I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

James Lasdun

#16. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.

Anthony Hecht

#17. We are really on track for a soft landing. There are no balloons popping.

David Lereah

#18. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

James Lasdun

#19. When it's right, it's simple," he says to my unasked question. "Unlike your hair.

Stephanie Perkins

#20. There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers.

James Lasdun