Thomas C. Foster

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It__ all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things__lesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief at all.

Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again

The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.

Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.

Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.

Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.

Every novel is brand-new. It__ never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it__ merely the latest in a long line of narratives__ot just novels, but narratives generally__ince humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.

we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.