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“And what I really wish to record – as if otherwise I might forget it – is merely that there has not always been snow outside, that much else has occurred during this past year, bloom and harvest and the fragrance of resin throughout the woods, water dripping and trickling down over the rocks of the face of the Kuppron, wind blowing from afar and dying away, light that flamed and faded, and skies that changed from day to night and back again to day. All this occurred while my heart was beating, while wind and sun and clouds were there, all of them flowing through my hands and my heart.”
(Hermann Broch, The Spell, trans. H. F. Broch de Rotherman, p. 6.)
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“ ‘Oh, excuse me, I would so love to stay and discuss this, but you see, I brought my pet tortoise with me and it has run away, and I must try to find it before it buries itself in the dirt that is our lives.’ ”
(Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon, p. 3.)
“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture-makers enjoy making furnitures, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true at all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”
(John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 86.)
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