13 Quotes by Paul Lynch

Meditation forms a part of my daily life and it guides my mind into the necessary space for writing. It seems that I enter some kind of alertful trance when I work. I become the moment in which I am writing. And yet I am there, the author, standing in the river and meddling with the flow.

A book often begins with a vision, something half-seen that needs to be explored.

I ask myself if I have got close enough to what I am writing about. Often, I find the closer you get, the more texture you are going to end up with. That for sure will slow a reader down. And great if it does.

Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment—to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness.

Writing is following the sky of your mind. Who knows from where the winds blow. Or perhaps we are diviners. You cannot see the spring beneath but suddenly there is a twitch in the stick.

The internet generates a constant fear of missing out. It is the tyranny of the new. But what the writer seeks is human truth and that is as old as the ages.

I wanted to explore how we live our lives in certainty, only to discover that we really know nothing, that the truth is we are philosophically blind. And yet the human mind cannot help but tell itself narratives to explain the world. 

I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible.

I certainly do not fear for the life of literature. There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives.