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Quote by James Wood

“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” quote by James Wood — Download Open image

““fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.””

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“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…

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“Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.”

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“Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he…

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“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I…

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“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need:…

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“Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing”

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“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…

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“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of…

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“They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen…

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“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…

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“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice.…

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“Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings…

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Explore all 16 James Wood quotes