Top 51 Scarlett Thomas Quotes
#2. You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.
Scarlett Thomas
#3. And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: it's pure cause and effect.
Scarlett Thomas
#5. People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.
Scarlett Thomas
#7. I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.
Scarlett Thomas
#9. For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else.
Scarlett Thomas
#10. One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.
Scarlett Thomas
#11. Oh fuck. It's like period pain in my head. It's toothache of the brain.
Scarlett Thomas
#13. I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.
Scarlett Thomas
#14. Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.
Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.
No, I realise. It's the reverse.
Scarlett Thomas
#15. Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe.
Scarlett Thomas
#16. I realised that when someone plays hard to get, they are making themselves into a character in a story, and they choose the story that leads to the outcome they want.
Scarlett Thomas
#18. Now dare to be tragic, for you will be redeemed.' Friedrich Nietzsche Ah!
Scarlett Thomas
#19. Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.
Scarlett Thomas
#20. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.
Scarlett Thomas
#21. Libby stood at the bar like something that had been hastily added at the end of a painting that hasn't quite dried yet.
Scarlett Thomas
#22. One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.
Scarlett Thomas
#23. Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.
Scarlett Thomas
#24. I don't have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the penciled-in marginalia of a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I'd been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.
Scarlett Thomas
#25. Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.
Scarlett Thomas
#26. Somewhere in the world there is a magical book. What does this book do? It simply changes itself to become the book you most need at this point in your life.
Scarlett Thomas
#29. One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
Scarlett Thomas
#30. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!
Rashers Tierney
#31. The clue's always, always, buried deep in the boredom ...
Where do you feel most bored? Go there.
Scarlett Thomas
#32. Everything I know I imagine everyone else knows as well. And then everything that everyone else knows I imagine they know on top of what I know, so I'm constantly anxious about what everyone else knows.
Scarlett Thomas
#33. I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.
Scarlett Thomas
#34. If life wasn't going to be like a Hollywood film, there was only one option: fuck life and rent the film instead.
Scarlett Thomas
#35. 'being published' is not the same as being a real writer.
Scarlett Thomas
#36. What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.
Scarlett Thomas
#37. I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.
Scarlett Thomas
#38. I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.
Scarlett Thomas
#39. Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book ... an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.
Scarlett Thomas
#40. Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.
Scarlett Thomas
#41. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
Scarlett Thomas
#42. Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free ... It's a dangerous world out there, filled with predators ... What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom.
Scarlett Thomas
#43. It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?
Scarlett Thomas
#44. In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.
Scarlett Thomas
#46. I'd been pleased to find there was an alternative to the other stuff, which all reminded me of advertisements containing people with perfect teeth, heroic expressions and offspring that looked like they were on their way to Hitler youth rallies.
Scarlett Thomas
#47. Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or ... ' I'm drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But
Scarlett Thomas
#48. Only in homeopathy do you get specific remedies for people who believe they are made of glass, have a delusion that they are selling green vegetables, or have an aptitude for, or a horror of, mathematics.
Scarlett Thomas
#49. I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.
Scarlett Thomas
#50. My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.
Scarlett Thomas
#51. Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.
Scarlett Thomas
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