Norman Rush Quotes

United States, Writer
October 24, 1933

Norman Rush is an American writer whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He won the U.S. National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.

I feel like someone after a deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I'm still plucking seaweed out of my hair.

Norman Rush
- Describe
- Flood
- Deluge
I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Norman Rush

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

Norman Rush
Small breasts are best for the long haul.

Norman Rush
- Long
- Breasts
- Haul
The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

Norman Rush
- Characters
- Plot
- Natures
It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

Norman Rush
- Magic
- Growing Up
- Fantasy
Literature is humanity talking to itself.

Norman Rush
I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

Norman Rush