Paul Beatty Quotes

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.

All good novelists have bad memories.

Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

I was thinking about the difference in voice between the different characters. Each voice has to be unique. Hypothetically you should be able to read each chapter without the heading that tells you who is telling the story.

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

Life is nothing but a memory. People who dwell on the bad ones aren't going to have a whole lot of good ones coming up.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy!

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

I hope that, reading 'Rosa,' people will remember their own family and friends and talk about what they did and did not do.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.