“Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier,… — 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
“Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.” — James Wood Copy Share
“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
“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
“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
“Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing” — James Wood Copy Share
“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” — James Wood Copy Share
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
