Tim Parks > Quotes

“With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.”
― Tim Parks

“Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.”
― Tim Parks, Stop What You're Doing and Read This!

“But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”
― Tim Parks

“What wonderful minds we have, even though they don’t seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.”
― Tim Parks, Europa

“In America the lack of investment in train travel speaks eloquently of a country always ready to appear righteous but pathologically averse to surrendering car and plane for a more eco-friendly, community-conscious form of mobility.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Blessed is that family where there are old people, says an ancient proverb, and happy the children who heed the counsel of the old, for it's as if they had already enjoyed a long life. Love your grandparents, children, for they love you as the sons and daughters of their sons and daughters, and hence with a double tenderness. If you see they love your company, don't leave them alone, and when it's their birthday, never forget to with them many happy returns, 'A hundred more happy returns, Granny and Granddad!”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education

“What a beautiful respite a train journey is and a good book, too, and best of all the book on the train, in life and out of it at the same time, before we arrive at Termini and disembark and the book is put down and we must all part and go our separate ways, forever.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.”
― Tim Parks

“Life presents itself first and foremost as a task. We take no pleasure in it except when we are striving after something.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

“It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long
ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it.
It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement
inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when
there is no enjoyment.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“And I think, one of the reasons I've stayed in Italy is that I believe, perhaps erroneously, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps merely in reaction to my own childhood of church bells and rainy weekends - I do believe that kids have a better time here, that adolescence is more fun here. Certainly I never saw a group of people so confident and at ease with themselves and their youth. I wish it for my children.”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education

“The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells. The car is too banal. What does it mean to set off in a car? Nothing. The airport is too exhausting and impersonal, the plane itself remote, unseen, the barriers and security disturbing. Here the powerful beast of the locomotive thrusts its nose under the great arch of the station.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“it was through constructing a network of railways across some of Europe’s most arduous terrain that the newly formed Italian nation won a reputation for ingenuity and adventurous construction projects.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation-state could be reconstructed through an account of the country’s railways.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can’t make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we’re lucky, poetry.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“the city’s government seized and sold Church property until the”
― Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

“In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north . . . When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn’t expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity.”
― Tim Parks

“In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by,”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now.”
― Tim Parks

“Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”
― Tim Parks

“One of the most characteristic Italian emotions, it seems to me, is that mixture of envy, perplexity and wonder that comes when one realises that others are working the system far more effectively than oneself - said com'è? - this together with the knowledge that they are doing so and will continue to do so with absolute impunity. Until it dawns on you that the system was invented in order to be worked in this way.”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education

“. . . people want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it’s embarrassing.”
― Tim Parks

“There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“It makes the nation possible and allows it to remain fragmented, allows people to live double lives.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. I still recall a conversation around my father’s deathbed when the visiting doctor asked him what his three children were doing. When he arrived at the last and said young Timothy was writing a novel and wanted to become a writer, the good lady, unaware that I was entering the room, told my father not to worry, I would soon change my mind and find something sensible to do. Many years later, the same woman shook my hand with genuine respect and congratulated me on my career. She had not read my books.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“E-kitap, elimizde tuttuğumuz somut nesnenin görüntü ve ağırlığındaki bütün farklılıkları ortadan kaldırmasıyla, kelime dizisinin neresinde olduğumuzdan başka herhangi bir şeye yoğunlaşmamızı teşvik etmeyişiyle (okuduğumuz sayfa yok olur, ilerideki sayfa henüz görünmemiştir) diyebiliriz ki bizi edebiyat deneyiminin özüne kağıt kitaptan daha fazla yaklaştırır. Hiç şüphesiz, geleneksel kağıt kitaba kıyasla, önümüzde belirip arkamızda kaybolan kelimelerle daha ciddi ve doğrudan bir ilişki sunar; duvarlarımızı ünlü adlarla kaplamanın fetişist tatmini sağlamaz. Metni çevreleyen bütün dışsal ve dikkat dağıtıcı unsurlardan arınır, kelimelerin kendilerinden aldığımız zevke yoğunlaşırız adeta. Bu bakımdan kağıt kitaptan e-kitaba geçiş, resimli çocuk kitaplarından sadece metni içeren yetişkin sayfalarına geçişe benzetilebilir. E-kitap yetişkinler için bir mecradır.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday’s vision of the future.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo