Russell Hoban Quotes

“What I am
is tired of jam.”

Russell Hoban

“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

Russell Hoban

“Who is Alice?" asked mother.
"Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger”

Russell Hoban

Source: A Birthday for Frances

“There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances.
'Did he bite you?' said Father.
'No,' said Frances.
'Did he scratch you?' said Mother.
'No,' said Frances.
'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.”

Russell Hoban

Source: Bedtime for Frances

“Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas … that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.”

Russell Hoban

The Moment Under the Moment (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Foreword