78 Quotes by Scarlett Thomas

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

It’s not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It’s in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?

For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it’s like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it’s wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I’ve got.

In some ways I’m a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I’ve thought I’d go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that’s not quite me. What’s me is to do it in novels.

I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn’t undo the fact that I’d had the thought in the first place.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way – you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what’s going to happen at the end. But that doesn’t mean you know what’s going to happen in the middle. For me, it’s that sense of what happens in the middle that’s important.

I’m a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.