Paul Lynch > Paul's Quotes

“What I’m interested in discovering is human truth. What does it mean to be alive within the dream of life? It seems to me there are essential human truths that have never changed throughout the ages, and that what we think of as unique to our own time is, in fact, the general. I am convinced, as a writer, that we must be able to witness ourselves as we have been moved and shaped by such universal forces.”
― Paul Lynch

“I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible.”
― Paul Lynch

“How do you write about what can’t be written about? I try to bend language until it can suggest the ineffable, the great gap between what we think we know, and what we don’t know. The felt but not expressed. The intuited but not understood.”
― Paul Lynch

“I do think you must always write for the ideal reader. But it would be folly to worry too much about who exactly that is.”
― Paul Lynch

“I ask myself if I have got close enough to what I am writing about. Often, I find the closer you get, the more texture you are going to end up with. That for sure will slow a reader down. And great if it does.”
― Paul Lynch

“Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment—to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness.”
― Paul Lynch

“I certainly do not fear for the life of literature. There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives.”
― Paul Lynch

“The internet generates a constant fear of missing out. It is the tyranny of the new. But what the writer seeks is human truth and that is as old as the ages.”
― Paul Lynch

“A book often begins with a vision, something half-seen that needs to be explored.”
― Paul Lynch

“What hides in plain sight is the inexplicable. It is an absence that is always present. ”
― Paul Lynch

“Writing is rewriting and though there are many passages in my books that are essentially a first take, everything else can take many, many attempts before it finds the ideal shape. And what makes it ideal? I know it when I read it.”
― Paul Lynch

“Meditation forms a part of my daily life and it guides my mind into the necessary space for writing. It seems that I enter some kind of alertful trance when I work. I become the moment in which I am writing. And yet I am there, the author, standing in the river and meddling with the flow.”
― Paul Lynch

“I wanted to explore how we live our lives in certainty, only to discover that we really know nothing, that the truth is we are philosophically blind. And yet the human mind cannot help but tell itself narratives to explain the world. ”
― Paul Lynch

“Writing is following the sky of your mind. Who knows from where the winds blow. Or perhaps we are diviners. You cannot see the spring beneath but suddenly there is a twitch in the stick.”
― Paul Lynch