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Authors:

David Lodge quotes

British Author January 28, 1935

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Quotes

I've been in love with you for weeks.' There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.' Haven't you ever been in love, then?' When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.' What the hell does that mean?' We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language. David Lodge
It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything... David Lodge
David Lodge quote: "Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children...."
Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around David Lodge
David Lodge quote: "It's a special form of scholarly neurosis, said Camel. `He's..."
It's a special form of scholarly neurosis, said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature. David Lodge
David Lodge quote: "Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards."
Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards. David Lodge
What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead David Lodge
The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for him or herself. Repetition and simplicity worked (usually) for Hemingway's artistic purposes. Variation and decoration worked for Nabokov's, especially in Lolita. This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a "nymphet", leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its... David Lodge
David Lodge quote: "It's the only thing that keeps me going these days,..."
It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces David Lodge
What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction. David Lodge
The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as... David Lodge
We’re a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self David Lodge
In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots... David Lodge
J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour. David Lodge
Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad David Lodge
What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted. David Lodge

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