Nicholas Royle Quotes
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I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears.
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The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.
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The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
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I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.
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I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
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I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.
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I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.
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I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.
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I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal, concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or two entities that were altered doubles of each other? Twins that had been separated and kept in neighbouring houses and raised according to different sets of rules as a social experiment? It was irresistible as a metaphor for division in the mind, for a split personality.
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Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
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I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.
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The Belgians tend to downplay the cultural divide issue, and the far-right issue, but there's a staggering degree of casual racism in Belgium, much worse than in the UK.
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Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.
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I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
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What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.
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Belgium is a country with a split personality.
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I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
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There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.
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