Norman Lock Quotes

• Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.

  Norman Lock

  Reading, Writing, Comforting

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy.

  Norman Lock

  Character, Viewpoints, Matter

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

  Norman Lock

  Drama, Writing, Two

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else.

  Norman Lock

  Drama, Believe, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Singing, Peculiar

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

  Norman Lock

  Giving, Purpose, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Play, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Character, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

  Norman Lock

  Favors, Dramatic, Confession

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

  Norman Lock

  Character, Voice, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.

  Norman Lock

  Country, Intelligent, Past

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

  Norman Lock

  Believe, Stories, Use

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

  Norman Lock

  Motivation, Heart, Humans

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

  Norman Lock

  Ideas, Narrators, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

  Norman Lock

  Fiction, Reader, Great Gifts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

  Norman Lock

  Character, Voice, Progress

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

  Norman Lock

  Real, Self, Purpose

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

  Norman Lock

  Believe, Adventure, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

  Norman Lock

  Lying, Character, Theatre

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

  Norman Lock

  Spiritual, Religious, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

  Norman Lock

  Ideas, Creating, Inquiry

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Worry, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Long, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

  Norman Lock

  Art, Crow, Would Be

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

  Norman Lock

  Book, Reading, School

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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