Fox News interview, , quoted in [2007-04-30, Romney Favors Hubbard Novel, Jim Rutenberg, The Caucus, The New York Times, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/romney-favors-hubbard-novel/]
asked his favorite novel
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President
“He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror.”
Julian Symons, in the Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1975.
Criticism
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Frederick Rolfe 12
British writer, photographer and historian 1860–1913Related quotes
The State in Journal des débats (1848) par. 5.20.
Variant: The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
To Reach Eternity (1989)
"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)
Context: We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
“A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”
In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Malcolm Bradbury, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50701
Criticism
“One writer quite cutely remarks that his best work of fiction was his Income Tax Return.”
The Pageant of Life (1964), On Writers