{"author":"Thomas C. Foster","author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster","total_quotes":19,"quotes":[{"text":"History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["history","stories"],"id":555,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["books","literature","quest","writing"],"id":13951,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["imagination","readers-and-writers"],"id":24239,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["arbitrariness","grammar","language","literature"],"id":25583,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["characters","literature","reading","reading-life"],"id":39722,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["acceptance","false-dichotomy","rain","universality"],"id":57874,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["genius","james-joyce"],"id":61898,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["bad-writing","hamlet","stories","writing"],"id":65728,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["characters","novels"],"id":111894,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["attention","death-of-literature","literature","progress","stagnant"],"id":206781,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}