“I never read contemporary fiction – with one exception: the works of Simenon concerned with Inspector Maigret.”
T. S. Eliot in the Sunday Times, 1952; cited from David Chinitz T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 56
Criticism
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Georges Simenon 7
Belgian writer 1903–1989Related quotes
Scraps and Morsels (1960).
Context: Strange reading? It is meant to be. The world is full of romantic, macabre, improbable things which would never do in works of fiction. When those that come within one man's notice are gathered together in a scrapbook, they tell of a world which sobersided folk may not choose to recognize as their own. But it is their own; I have the evidence.
Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 42
“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.”
Interview in The Times (29 March 1960), p. 7
1950s
“To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.”
After February 22, 1846
Journals (1838-1859)
“The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.”
Alistair Cooke