Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Character
-
I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.
→ -
Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.
→ -
Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
→ -
If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.
→ -
I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.
→ -
I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.
→
Related Authors
-
Jane Smiley Novelist -
Edward P. Jones Novelist -
Rod Dreher Writer -
Jennifer Egan Novelist -
Lydia Davis Writer -
Colm Toibin Novelist -
Paul Harding Musician -
Margaret Atwood Poet -
Jeb Bush Former Governor of Florida -
John Updike Novelist -
Michael Cunningham Writer -
Joseph O'Neill Novelist -
Hilary Mantel Writer -
Anne Tyler Novelist -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Cormac McCarthy Novelist -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Anthony Doerr Author of novels -
Richard Powers Novelist -
Alice Munro Author