26 Quotes by James Wood

There was nothing about it that was as I expected, nothing was predictable, ... Every time I thought they were going one way, they went another.

It seems a well-run festival. The people are great, and San Diego is a very welcoming town. I'm having a great time.

In absolute terms there has been no period like the past three years in Washington County history. It's a frenzy. That's all anyone talks about is housing prices and how much money they have made.

I read this script, it was like taking a trip through the other side of hell.

Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as – in Ford Madox Ford’s words – a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.

The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her – when we reach “huddled” we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author’s magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried.

They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife.