M. John Harrison Quotes

I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.

A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

The beauty of life is not knowing.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

Maybe it's important to open up I people- people who are right there with you, not some thousand miles away in another universe. Or maybe it's something else. Maybe I should just settle for not knowing. Maybe it's just good to know that you're not the only one who doesn't know.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

To feel the anguish of waiting for the next moment and of taking part in the complex current (of affairs) not knowing that we are headed toward ourselves, through millions of stone beings - of bird beings - of star beings - of microbe beings - of fountain beings toward ourselves.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.