1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Tim Parks

Tim Parks Quotes

Timothy Harold "Tim" Parks is a British novelist, translator and author.

✵ 19. December 1954   •   Other names ティム・パークス
Tim Parks photo
Tim Parks: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Tim Parks Quotes

“All Dickens is packed with orphans or people in uncertain relation to family groups, or clubs. It’s impossible to read anything he wrote without feeling that the question of belonging was a major issue for him. He had to write about these matters. If we read Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories, weird and unpleasant as they may be, they are all obsessively about fear of otherness—women’s, people of other races’, aliens’. All the over-heated horror of the books arises from this gut fear. He can’t leave it alone. Whether or not we like the books and quite regardless of any verisimilitude, it’s clear that the author is writing directly from his personal concerns. The stuff wasn’t just constructed for a literary prize. A certain form of repetition, particularly the endless reformulation, in dozens of different guises, of the same core conflict is probably the hallmark of authenticity.”

Tim Parks

"In Search of Authenticity," The New York Review of Books (4 February 2015).

“Virginia Woolf thought one of the pleasures of reading contemporary novels was that they forced you to exercise your judgment. There was no received opinion about a book. You had to decide for yourself whether it was good.”

Tim Parks

"Why Read New Books?" The New York Review of Books (11 November 2014).

““Into thirty centuries born,” Edwin Muir began his most celebrated poem, “At home in them all but the very last.” Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. 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.”

Tim Parks

"Why Read New Books?" The New York Review of Books (11 November 2014).

Similar authors

A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne 169
British author
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing 94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer …
V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul 34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Arthur C. Clarke 207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u…
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham 158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer
Elias Canetti photo
Elias Canetti 43
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,…
William Golding photo
William Golding 79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite…
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro 76
Japanese-born British author
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 78
British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy …
Robert Baden-Powell photo
Robert Baden-Powell 23
lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and…