"Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted"
About this Quote
Novel-writing, Brookner suggests, is less a window onto life than a well-appointed blindfold. “Preserves you in a state of innocence” lands with a faintly mordant elegance: innocence here isn’t purity, it’s protection-by-distraction. The verb “preserves” does double duty, evoking both conservation (like fruit in syrup) and self-preservation. You don’t become innocent; you’re kept that way, sealed off from certain abrasions of living.
Her syntax enacts the bargain. The dash interrupts like a private aside, admitting the cost: “a lot passes you by.” That blunt phrase punctures any romantic mythology of the novelist as hyper-attuned observer. Brookner flips the cliché. The writer doesn’t necessarily notice more; she may be noticing elsewhere, in the invented circuitry of a book. The final clause, “simply because your attention is otherwise diverted,” is almost aggressively plain, as if to deny drama. But the plainness is the sting: diversion is not tragedy, it’s habit, and habits quietly rewire a life.
Context matters. Brookner was a historian by training and a novelist by vocation, someone steeped in the discipline of looking backward, weighing evidence, turning experience into narrative. Her line reads like a confession from that border: to make art is to select, to narrow, to miss. The subtext isn’t self-pity; it’s a cool warning about the vocation’s hidden luxury - you can outsource immediacy to the page - and its hidden loss: the world keeps happening, unrecorded, while you are busy arranging what didn’t.
Her syntax enacts the bargain. The dash interrupts like a private aside, admitting the cost: “a lot passes you by.” That blunt phrase punctures any romantic mythology of the novelist as hyper-attuned observer. Brookner flips the cliché. The writer doesn’t necessarily notice more; she may be noticing elsewhere, in the invented circuitry of a book. The final clause, “simply because your attention is otherwise diverted,” is almost aggressively plain, as if to deny drama. But the plainness is the sting: diversion is not tragedy, it’s habit, and habits quietly rewire a life.
Context matters. Brookner was a historian by training and a novelist by vocation, someone steeped in the discipline of looking backward, weighing evidence, turning experience into narrative. Her line reads like a confession from that border: to make art is to select, to narrow, to miss. The subtext isn’t self-pity; it’s a cool warning about the vocation’s hidden luxury - you can outsource immediacy to the page - and its hidden loss: the world keeps happening, unrecorded, while you are busy arranging what didn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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