“Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape—or more accurately, nothing but its present—until it has its ending; and then suddenly… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.” — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need:… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing” — James Wood Copy Share Image
“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” — James Wood Copy Share Image
“This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice.… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to… — James Wood Copy Share Image
“If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal,… — James Wood Copy Share Image
