Scarlett Thomas Quotes

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

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

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

Routine kills creative thought.

I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate.

Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.

For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else.

The sky was the colour of sad weddings.

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.

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

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

You tell them what a happy ending consists of, which is always individual success. You tell them that nothing irrational exists in this world, which is a lie. You tell them that conflict only exists only to be neatly resolved, and that everyone who is poor wants to be rich, and everyone who is ill wants to get better, and everyone who gets involved in crime comes to a bad end, and that love should be pure. You tell them that despite all this they are special, that the world revolves around them.

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

Honesty and authenticity are a big deal for me.

I hate stereotypes and I hate cliche.

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

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

Everything I know I imagine everyone else knows as well. And then everything that everyone else knows I imagine they know on top of what I know, so I'm constantly anxious about what everyone else knows.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?

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.

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

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

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