Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Scott Bradfield

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American essayist Scott Bradfield.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Scott Bradfield

Scott Michael Bradfield is an American essayist, critic and fiction writer who resides in London, England. He has taught at the University of California, the University of Connecticut and Kingston University and has reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, Elle, The Observer, Vice and The Independent. He is best known, however, for his short stories, of which he has had four collections published. The 1998 film Luminous Motion, for which he wrote the screenplay, was based on his first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989). Bradfield also operates a public youtube channel, where he uploads videos on a variety of books and literary topics.

For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.
For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions...
I enjoy entering the viewpoint of characters who are as different from myself as I can get - children, elderly women, animals, a sexy death row murderess - and to imagine how these disparate individuals see the world's cruelty and beauty and vastness.
I am not especially good at remembering the actualities of the world I inhabit, but I have pretty strong associative memories of how it feels to live in that world, and to wonder at its weird machinations, at any age.
Perhaps teenagers don't interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character.
I've always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren't entirely believable...
Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.
The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.
Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.
We all make terrible mistakes in our lives. — © Scott Bradfield
We all make terrible mistakes in our lives.
I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them!
In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.
I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.
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