James Wood > Quotes

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“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, more marked, as it disappears.”
― James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

“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, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil.” With literary belief, however, “one is always free to choose not to believe.” This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its “reality.”
― James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

“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 or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life.”
― James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel

“Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves.”
― James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

“The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.”
― James Wood

“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.”
― James Wood

“Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.”
― James Wood

“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her—when we reach “huddled” we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author’s magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams." -- review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)”
― James Wood review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

“is there so much suffering, so much death? I was told that God’s ways are incomprehensible, and that in many cases, a Job-like humility”
― James Wood, The Nearest Thing To Life

“When I left England eighteen years ago, I didn’t know then how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have known? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’,18 which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”
― James Wood, The Nearest Thing To Life

“This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven—one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.”
― James Wood

“The curious advantage of being able to survey the span of someone else’s life, from start to finish, can seem peremptory, high-handed, forward. Grief doesn’t seem entitlement enough for the arrogation of the divine powers of beginning and ending. We are uneasy with such omniscience. We do not possess it with regard to our own lives. But if this ability to see the whole of a life is God-like it also augurs a revolt against God: once a life is contained, made final, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a smaller, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else’s, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know, with horror, will be thoroughly forgotten within a few generations. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death gives birth to the first question—Why?—and seems to kill all the answers.”
― James Wood

“Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.”
― James Wood

“They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife.”
― James Wood

“In the same way, it often seems that James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them. Take The Portrait of a Lady. It is very hard to say what Isabel Archer is like, exactly, and she seems to lack the definition, the depth if you like, of a heroine like Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running—what he calls “getting a character in.” He says that Conrad himself “was never really satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got his characters in; he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books.” I like this idea, that some of Conrad’s novels are long because he couldn’t stop fiddling, page after page, with the verisimilitude of his characters—it raises the specter of an infinite novel. At least the apprentice writer, with his bundle of nerves, is in good company, then. Ford and Conrad loved a sentence from a Maupassant story, “La Reine Hortense”: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.” Ford is right. Very few brushstrokes are needed to get a portrait walking, as it were; and—a corollary of this—that the reader can get as much from small, short-lived, even rather flat characters as from large, round, towering heroes and heroines. To my mind, Gurov, the adulterer in “The Lady with the Little Dog,” is as vivid, as rich, and as sustaining as Gatsby or Dreiser’s Hurstwood, or even Jane Eyre.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Fiction-making seems labored and obstructive because our age has a powerful “reality hunger,” to borrow the title of a manifesto by David Shields1, published in the same year as Heti’s novel. Shields argues against conventional fictional artifice in favor of what he calls “reality-based” art. “I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless,” he writes. He has no time for characters’ names, plot developments, blocks of dialogue,”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

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

“Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“it has explained a story when all it has done is told one.”
― James Wood, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

“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 the whole trajectory is visible.”
― James Wood

“In [James Kelman's story] 'The Third Man, or Else the Fourth,' four men stand around a fire, on a freezing day. They appear to be out of work, and very poor. They talk about politics, about an old man who was recently found dead in a cold tenement building, about prison. One of the men, Arthur, starts describing a dream he had. Like most dreams, it is incomprehensible; it gathers pace, and we are drawn into it, and then it fizzles out. Kelman makes a funny, implicit connection between maintaining the fire (the narrator goes off to get "burnables") and maintaining a story: everything is potentially burnable, everything can be used.”
― James Wood

“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 see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person narrator’s). 11”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Iris Murdoch is the most poignant member of this second category, precisely because she spent her life trying to get into the first. In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of the great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom. She knew it, too: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one’s failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.”6”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works