29+ Norman Lock Quotes to Experience the Power of Storytelling

Norman Lock is a prolific American novelist, known for his thought-provoking stories and engaging writing style. His quotes offer deep insights into life, human nature, and the art of storytelling. Reading his quotes can inspire you, challenge your perspectives, and enhance your understanding of literature.
Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature. —Joyce Carol Oates
Despite the American Novels’ dark subject matter, their impact is exhilarating as well as scarifying. In American Follies as in its predecessors, Lock’s supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character possibly equal to his chagrin over our bloodstained past. —Washington Post
Lock’s fiction shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. —NPR Following is our collection on famous quotes by Norman Lock on life, love, inventive.

Top 10 Norman Lock Quotes

1. A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.
2. I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.
3. Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.
4. For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.
5. I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.
6. It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.
7. I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.
8. When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.
9. I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.
10. I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Norman Lock Quotes About Life

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work. — Norman Lock

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own. — Norman Lock

Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting. — Norman Lock

Norman Lock Quotes About Characters

Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it. — Norman Lock

In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies. — Norman Lock

I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else. — Norman Lock

As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy. — Norman Lock

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch. — Norman Lock

Norman Lock Famous Quotes And Sayings

In an age such as ours, when history is neglected, suppressed, or even rewritten to suit a narrow, prejudiced view, when truth is falsified, and a witness liable to perjury, writers, it seems to me, have an obligation to give notice to their readers of their adaptations of the historical record and appropriations of actual characters. — Norman Lock

Time and again, I have written myself into a corner, pursuing an answer to the old conundrum: whether individuals are obligated to act against wrongdoing or are obliged by uncertainty to “hang fire,” in that picturesque Jamesian image. Stated another way, the dilemma is this: If we reject universal moral laws as an aspect of absolutism and adopt relativism in their stead, how are we to judge others and ourselves? The issue is not original, but it is critical nonetheless. I am not excused from having to confront it because I am unequipped to be a philosopher or a theologian or because so many other men and women have struggled with it. Each of us is required to take up the grave matters of the age and of the day, as though no one before us has considered them. — Norman Lock

Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres. — Norman Lock

I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent. — Norman Lock

Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage. — Norman Lock

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons. — Norman Lock

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems. — Norman Lock

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas. — Norman Lock

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects. — Norman Lock

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling. — Norman Lock

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship. — Norman Lock

Life Lessons by Norman Lock

1. From Lock's intricate narratives and profound character development, we learn the art of weaving complex human emotions into simple, relatable stories, teaching us that even the most ordinary lives harbor extraordinary tales.
2. Lock's exploration of historical and philosophical themes imparts the lesson of incorporating diverse elements into our writing, reminding us that by delving into the depths of the past and questioning the present, we can create a literary tapestry that is both enlightening and engaging.
3. Lastly, his mastery in employing surrealism and magical realism teaches us the power of transcending the boundaries of reality in our writing, demonstrating that through the lens of imagination, we can illuminate the unseen corners of the human psyche.