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[...] I kept on pushing at my own limitations and at the limits of science fiction. That is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it you make a whole, solid, real, and beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete. [...]
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel - or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel - is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human being [...] could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know fully what it is to be human. [...]
[...] the shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them. For the shadow is not simply evil [...] without it, the person is nothing. What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. The person who denies his own profound relationship with evil denies his own reality. He cannot do, or make; he can only undo, unmake.
[...] There is no right way to act when you're the hero or heroine of a fairy tale. There is no system of conduct, there are no standards of what a nice prince does and what a good little girl doesn't do. I mean, do good little girls usually push old ladies into baking ovens, and get rewarded for it? [...]
In the fairy tale, though there is no "right" and "wrong", there is a different standard, which is perhaps best called "appropriateness." [...] under the conditions of fairy tale, in the language of the archetypes, we can say with perfect conviction that it may be appropriate to do so. Because, in those terms, the witch is not an old lady, nor is Gretel a little girl. Both are psychic factors, elements of the complex soul. Gretel is the archaic child-soul, innocent, defenseless; the witch is the archaic crone, the possessor and destroyer, the mother who feeds you cookies and who must be destroyed before she eats you like a cookie, so that you can grow up and be a mother too. [...]
[...] Nothing is more personal, more unshareable, than pain; the worst thing about suffering is that you suffer alone. Yet those who have not suffered, or will not admit that they suffer, are those who are cut off in cold isolation from their fellow men. Pain, the loneliest experience, gives rise to sympathy, to love: the bridge between self and other, the means of communion. So with art. The artist who goes into himself most deeply - and it is a painful journey - is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
[...] It's one thing to sacrifice fulfilment in the service of an ideal; it's another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
[...] I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
[...] The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; [...]
The credibility crunch, while long in the works, in part owes itself to the effects of austerity. In the first edition of Corbyn, I argued that Corbyn's leadership was made possible by a deep crisis in politics and representation. The secession of large parts of the electorate from the political system was evident in plummeting party membership and identification, and voter turnout. On the other side, politicians increasingly withdrew into the state, becoming less and less interested in the electorate except as a diminishing pool of participants to manipulate with good messaging. These were long-term processes, but the polarising effects of economic crisis and its austerian remedy accelerated them and produced a degree of hitherto unseen political instability.
For the managers of social democracy, the attempt to resist these cutbacks and gross transfers of wealth to the private sector was hopelessly utopian. Even if they felt the depth and speed of austerity driven by Angela Merkel and conservative technocrats was too severe, there was no working alternative model of growth on the horizon. And even if the private sector was sluggish and investment pitifully low, there was no question of any other sector leading a new round of growth. Certainly, any government which involved the state in taking over the means of investment and attempting to create new growth through public works would face the risk of stiff resistance from business, banks, civil servants, media, and of course European institutions. The legality and constitutionality of their actions could be challenged, and they might face continual crises and challenges from within. They would risk even lower rates of investment, downgrading by the ratings agencies such that borrowing would become impossible, and speculative attacks. It should not be so surprising, therefore, if we repeatedly find social democratic leaders, egged on by establishment media, capitulating to the agenda of their opponents with an air of heroic self-sacrifice.
[...] the Blairites' biggest problem was ideological. Whatever dynamism Blairism had, it sprang from sources not available in the post-crash economy. The programme it offered was designed for the 1990s and had ossified into dogma. The Blairite instinct always to move right squeezed its adherents into a shrinking political space. There were no more public services to be sacrificed to the market that the Tories had not already offered up. There were no more brownie points to be earned by sounding tough on the deficit that the Tories had not already banked. The Blairite agenda had reached the end of the line.