Category: quotable

I finished reading J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello last night, an interesting, ambiguous, even perplexing novel. It’s set up as a series of lectures that the character of Elizabeth Costello, a distinguished writer, gives at various locations (universities, conferences, even a cruise ship.) I was drawn to the character, and I also liked how her lectures dealt with so many different, important topics. And I think what I most liked about the book is that it defies classification or labels. Speaking of which, here’s a little excerpt I underlined:

‘Your handicap is that you’re not a problem. What you write hasn’t yet been demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over into their court. But for the present you’re not a problem, just an example.’
‘An example of what?’
‘An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance.’
‘An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?’

On a side note, I went to a chain bookstore the other day to get a copy of Diary of a Bad Year, but couldn’t find it on the display shelves. I asked a clerk at the information desk, “Do you have the latest Coetzee?”
“Is that the title?”
“No, no, that’s the author.”
“Who?”
“Coetzee? The South African writer? Well, now he’s Australian, but you know, from South Africa?”
“Oh” [Blank face.]
“You know, the guy who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago.”
“What’s the title again?”

“[A]buse is not sanctified by its duration or abundance; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes.”

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile.

“Pointless now to study or revise. Impossible to work. Impossible to do anything except chafe and fret and fight with Lateefa who now wants her children to remain in the inner living-room of their flat and not even sit – with the windows closed – in the outer rooms where the walls could fall in on top of them at any moment. Dada Zeina cannot come any more. She has to stay in her own home and look after her own children. No shops are open to be sent to buy anything from. To go to the club would be unthinkable. Apart from the odd phone conversation with a friend, the world has been narrowed down to the inner living-room. Even novels are no good any more: Asya opens Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and closes them again. Out there, there is the world and action and history taking shape. And in here: waiting, helplessness – paralysis.”

Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun.

From The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene:

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income-tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead; one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come, the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward; the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

With the novel I’m writing now, I feel like I’m well into the stage where the characters have begun to live, and of course there’s a lot of pleasure in this. But I still struggle with the fear that grips me whenever I sit down to write, the fear that I won’t be able to move forward. So it’s always nice to remember–or at least to hope–that the subconscious is always at work, and that progress may be right around the corner.

From Ursula LeGuin’s “Advice to A Young Writer”:

To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock …

Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man.