John Lanchester Quotes

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

With any book, I try to find where the manner of the making of the book is appropriate to the matter of the subject.