For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically. James Lasdun Read Quote
I don’t think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I’m not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it’s not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety. James Lasdun Read Quote
I consider myself a writer. I don’t favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me. James Lasdun Read Quote
The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy. James Lasdun Read Quote
Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don’t often make up a writer’s main body of work, and that’s not because they don’t see the market for it. James Lasdun Read Quote
I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end. James Lasdun Read Quote
There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers. James Lasdun Read Quote
I am not a supporter of Israel’s military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist. James Lasdun Read Quote
There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds. James Lasdun Read Quote
The nature of fiction is to make one distrustful of any character who lectures and castigates. James Lasdun Read Quote
