Charles Finch

I guess the lesson is you can__ go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

Of course, that__ one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We__e still waiting for the results.

If there__ a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it__ that there__ no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it__ waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it__ sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children__ literature: in a lot of children__ books, there__ a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children__ imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are _ and this ties into having your tools nailed down _ the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child__ books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J.__. Rowling is another master of this technique _ Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes __ride and Prejudice_ so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. __reaking Bad_ kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of __reedom,_ or __y Brilliant Friend,_ or __nna Karenina,_ all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

Are you going to give a speech?' she asked gaily.He gave a choked laugh. 'Of course not,' he said. 'Not for ages.''My cousin Davey gave one on his very first day!' ...'In the Lords, I remember. It was about how he didn't like strawberry jam.''Be nice, Charles! It was a speech about fruit importation, which I admit devolved into something of a tirade.' She couldn't help but laugh. 'Still, you could talk about something more important.''Than jam? Impossible. We mustn't set the bar too high, Jane.

_'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.

__e often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.

The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. .... The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It__ definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There__ no page of prose in existence that its author can__ improve after it__ been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level _ every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I__ amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling _ you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?

I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them _ a book review and a novel at the same time, for example. But I__e seen that writers who are starting out sometimes throw their energy in so many different directions that they can never finish any of the projects, much less all of them.To me a good test is this: what do you like to read? What kind of book moves and affects you the most? Is it the memoir, the novel, the long poem-collection? Personally, I find myself most immersed in the novel, and that__ why I write them _ they have the most magic for me. The joy of self-expression is exhilarating, but ultimately choosing one venue for it can make your work much better _ and same for your chances of actually finishing something.

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.

There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.

When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.

Suddenly Dallington burst into speech. 'Listen, Lenox - I want to apologize...'Lenox waved a dismissive hand. 'You're young,' he said. 'There are many lessons before you, some harder than this one... All too often things are blurry, though, John. It's the way of the world. Humans are blurry creatures,

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city_