Words matter. These are the best Graham Joyce Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
‘Plutocracy.’ It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.
Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.
It’s just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He’s the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called ‘chads,’ a notion we’ve never entirely grasped.
If I couldn’t get published tomorrow I’d still be writing. It’s something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.
Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.
The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.
I’d defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don’t take to it, don’t react by making out that they are thick.
Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny – or not so tiny – leap of the imagination is made.
My story reflexes come less from fantasy or horror than from the darker sort of psychological thriller – not as plot-driven as most, rather more mood-driven. My interest in the supernatural is a complication – though I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.
Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It’s not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.
Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of ‘fairy’ is imported as a delicate spice.
If critics of ‘readable fiction’ want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.
