Coxon Quotes

I’m constantly embarrassed. I fidget and twist my hair and pull weird faces and stutter. Some days I feel quite confident, then others there’s a microscopic flaw about myself physically, which will make me embarrassed to walk the streets.

I have too many romantic fantasies and they make me sad.

She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.

The membrane between worlds was thinner out here than the inland-dwelling peoples could ever realise, so they expected no help.

Enough of happy. I’m sick of happy. The prison of it, a weight on my lungs. The thing I should be aiming to feel, and make others feel. It’s a relief when the pleasant young man asks me instead, ‘Can you remember a time in the village when you were sad?

Let me always hide my little pains and heartaches so that I may be the only one to suffer from them. Teach me to profit by the suffering that comes across my path. Let me so use it that it may mellow me, not harden or embitter me;

May no one be less good for having come within my influence; no one less pure, less true, less kind, less noble, for having been a fellow traveler with me on our journey towards eternal life.

Human nature is a constant – except when it isn’t. In the future society, consciousness, the way in which people understand themselves to be people, might be very different. On the one hand, we might say that people have always fallen in love, made art, worshipped gods, fought wars and engaged in complex forms of political organisation and conflict. But our understanding of ourselves as human subjects today is profoundly different from medieval times, which, again, is profoundly different from Ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt; which, again, is profoundly different from Neolithic times… anyway, the point is, in the future, people might not share our values. Your vision of the future should reflect this and not simply reflect modern attitudes in different clothes. 6: Language shapes reality. Language changes over time. New words are coined, others fall out of use. Social and technological changes produce changes in the lexicon; styles of speaking and writing evolve, what was ‘normal’ in the eighteenth century seems obscure today – your future should reflect this, with new words, new slang, new expressions and colloquialisms, new ways of speaking and articulating. China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) is a good example of how to do this. Building a new, tangible reality out of language will give your vision of the future a density, credibility and coherence that goes beyond the practical mechanics of story, plot and structure. Finally, be bold – the future is yours to imagine.

​At the party to celebrate their number 1 single, Liam goaded Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon, boasting how his band were now more successful. Their rivalry had officially begun.

Writing fiction, imagining characters we have not met and do not know, we use our empathy to try to describe their lives. However, the imagination must be fed by research, or else we produce caricatures.

Theology, the domain of male priests, referred to spirits or souls, rather than ghosts, a word smacking of lay superstition and pagan practices, associated with women. The dead, however, were no respecters of categories and roamed in both discourses.

The ‘uncanny’, therefore, was not merely something unknown, but something that had been hidden or repressed. He famously called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.

This effect can often derive from the negative spaces that inhabit a story: the absence of information, the dearth of explanation, the omission of clarification and exposition. It is human nature to seek to fill in the gaps, and when the writer withholds these nuggets that will help the reader make sense of a story, the reader’s own interpretation is often more unsettling because it will draw on their own fears, paranoias and phobias. Sometimes, the absence of something can be more unnerving than a sinister presence.

In the novel Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford, the slugs which inhabit the narrator’s garden at night are ‘shrivelling over the pebble and dirt like the skin on staling fruit’.11 Here the visual image this summons is unsettling: the slug being likened to a foodstuff implies that it may be devoured, with all the revulsion that would entail, but without stating this explicitly.