Tim Parks Quotes

Si te liberas de esa compulsión, pensó Paul de pronto, si escapas de esa necesidad de engatusar y convencer y seducir, lo que quede después serás tú, tu verdadero ser.

Rather than a situation where people are naturally finding themselves reading the same thing and then talking about it, some readers are responding to celebrity in the hope that what they read will enable them to join an international conversation.

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.