No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. I still recall a conversation around my father’s deathbed when the visiting doctor asked him what his three children were doing. When he arrived at the last and said young Timothy was writing a novel and wanted to become a writer, the good lady, unaware that I was entering the room, told my father not to worry, I would soon change my mind and find something sensible to do. Many years later, the same woman shook my hand with genuine respect and congratulated me on my career. She had not read my books. Tim Parks
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  3. She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on. - Robert M. Drake
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More Quotes By Tim Parks
  1. What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.
  2. In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.
  3. In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose...
  4. But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer...
  5. 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.
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