David Lodge
David Lodge
David John Lodge CBEis an English author and literary critic born in London...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth28 January 1935
barrier best built coming crude electric fish great invader irony motivation passed proposed river round time
The electric barrier is crude but it's the best thing we have now. The irony is the barrier was first proposed to keep round gobies (another fish invader in the Great Lakes) from colonizing the Mississippi River watershed, but by the time the barrier was built they had already passed it. Now the motivation is to keep the carp from coming from the other direction.
across damages far great harm indeed lakes pipes plants power reaching rivers species spread threat
The damages are far reaching - from the shoreline, to the pipes of power plants and municipal waterworks, to the many other lakes and rivers that are under threat and indeed under harm as zebra mussels and many other species spread from the Great Lakes across the continent.
committing forecast hours itself next possible predicting seemed weather
The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific.
constantly difference funny god playing readers thoughtful writer writers
She was a very funny writer but also a very thoughtful one. She made writers think and she made readers think. She was constantly playing on the difference between God and the writer.
inherently species wrong
These species are not inherently bad. They're just in the wrong place.
company laid outside seen walt whitman words
Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
curiosity desire trying
to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing
fall break-through perfect
Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.
law academic-life peers
Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.
lyric-poetry literature analysis
Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.
educational cutting names
Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it.
intellectual thrill branches
I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.
ends walt company
Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
communication creativity phrases
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.