The Art of Subtext Quotes

“An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that somebody considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source from the power of an unthinkable thought.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in the front row of a theater, where the actors’ spit lands on your face.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“Creating a scene is thus the staging of a desire.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn’t have sleepless nights, how can he hope to cause sleepless nights in anyone else?”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul—and ambiguity, for that matter—out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“To the beautiful falls the right of command, he observes, quoting Aristotle, although he adds that this situation is not always just.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“Gurov, discovers that the most important features of life that you want to talk about cannot be spoken of in polite society.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“game of deducing a person’s character from that person’s appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“He gave the impression of being clean and dry as though he had been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

“and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue.”
― Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot