Scarlett Thomas Quotes

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Routine kills creative thought.

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.

Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church. Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks. No, I realise. It's the reverse.

The sky was the colour of sad weddings.

I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.

Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.

My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.

I hate stereotypes and I hate cliche.

Honesty and authenticity are a big deal for me.

Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.

Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe.

The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.

...'being published’ is not the same as being a real writer.

There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.

Not all events are stories.

I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.

I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.

But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.