Ellen Glasgow Quotes

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

I think the martial arts tradition has a big influence on our generation - we all read these novels when we were very young.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

I read, I think, I play, I work. And all that thinkingand playing and reading comes into my art. I couldn't really sithere and delineate for you what the thought process is. I can perhapssay that literature, psychoanalysis and theater have been very valuableexperiences that have informed and nourished me along the way.

What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You're already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you're changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes.

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.

The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author.

There's an argument that celebrities stop growing mentally the moment they reach stardom and then they just - everything goes away. I think that's true.

There is a huge difference between danger and fear.

Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it?

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

Nobody whom this war has touched will ever be happy again in quite the same way. But it will be a better happiness, I think, little sister - a happiness we've earned.

Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

The importance of the End of time is as ... a psychological event ... When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time ... and it is the function of art to make that visible to you ... then you have really have ended life in the world as it is lived by those who only think only in the historical, concretizing terms. This is the function of mythology.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

The key to moving a maybe to a yes is to make the buyer feel as though other buyers have already said yes. ... It helps if it's true, but it never is. No one wants to be the first yes. Why is this? I don't know, but I think it's anthropological.

Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life.