Quote collection
37 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There’s something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. You’re free to float to the moon and evaporate or sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean. But you’re free to explore. Some people confuse that with drifting, I suppose. I like to think of it as growing."
"Wish it, believe it, and it will be so."
"A photograph is a souvenir of life!"
"I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I'd never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang's editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history."
"We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others."
"This and the small sample size inevitably leads to stereotypes - sweeping family sagas from India, 'lush' colonial romances from South-East Asia. Mother and daughter reconciling generational differences through preparing a 'traditional' meal together. Geishas. And even if something more exciting does manage to sneak through, it gets the same insultingly clichéd cover slapped on it anyway, so no one will ever know."
"I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD."
"Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature'. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice."
"Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue."
"Happy people look young. You’re really afraid of getting older, aren’t you? You should only be afraid of getting less happy."
"Instead of fearing what might happen if I failed, I should be excited about what could happen if I succeeded!"
"Not only are unpaid internships exploitative, they're one of the main forces keeping publishing in this country a primary white middle-class industry, which has a direct knock-on effect on what gets published and how."
"And to improve access to the UK publishing industry - I'm hoping to set up an internship or work experience for someone from a low-income background, as soon as we have the funds. While we don't have the funds, we won't have an intern."
"The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful. PROVERBS 12:22"
"Flattery is a lie covered in a bed of flowery words."
"Khairani Barokka is a writer, spoken-word poet, visual artist and performer whose work has a strong vein of activism, particularly around disability, but also how this intersects with, for example, issues of gender - she's campaigned for reproductive rights in her native Indonesian, and is currently studying for a PhD in disability and visual cultures at Goldsmiths. She's written a feminist, environmentalist, anti-colonialist narrative poem, with tactile artwork and a Braille translation. How could I not publish that?"
"There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated."
"I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language."
"I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese."
"Alongside Han Kang, there's only one other author I've chosen to translate so far - Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she's translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary."