Barbara Pym Quotes

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

I prize being just a normal dude that wakes up, goes to work, comes home to his wife - like, quite boring.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

We all have a great time. And then I go to bed, get up and do it all over again. I like my life.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

I have a to-do list and I have a farm I care for, and things I like to do for fun - going to movies and all that stuff. It's a painfully normal life!

I'll never be, like, sippy cup country, or write about everything I do around the house.

I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts.

I concentrate, more than I think virtually any comic book artist has in the past, on the so-called mundane details of every day life - quotidian life. What happens to a person during a working day, marital relations, and stuff like that.

The photoshoot glitz and TV studio make-up isn't the real me. I spend most days at home in Bristol in jeans and a T-shirt running around after the kids or shopping in the Co-op.

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

I try not to set myself up as different or as a celebrity or special. I have a husband that can get on my nerves. I have kids that test my patience. I've got a cat I can't keep off the sofa. It's real. On a bad day, I'm reading 'Acts of Faith.'

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

I don't want to be treated like I came from another planet or something or was somehow born with some weird birthright or super power. I don't view myself that way. I am a normal guy, picking up the crap from the dog and scraping the BBQ and having a beer and fixing the shed out back.

Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else's life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business.

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.

What a day-to-day affair life is.

I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

I'm just a battler making an honest buck who goes home to his missus and his dog at the end of the day.

I call my mother every day for things: 'How long do you cook an egg for?' Or, 'Can you remind me of our dentist's phone number at home?'

I'm a pretty normal person outside of the film world. It doesn't really affect me when I'm at school or with my mates.

In my normal life I don't walk around with make-up. I'm just a mum at a dance school.

I'm not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life and just try to look at things a little more closely.

Bran was stripping her futon down to the bare mattress when she entered her apartment. It was sort of like watching the president mowing the White House lawn or taking out the trash.