Home > Author > M.J. Nicholls
1 " Why do I covet metafiction so much? Why do I nurture a style that David Foster Wallace purportedly exploded in the late 1980s, that is derided by most literary theorists as passé, that people tend to agree serves no worldly, moral purpose other than to draw attention to the writer’s own navel? Because, dammit, metafiction is relevant to today. "
― M.J. Nicholls
2 " Waking up is the strongest argument for full-blown misanthropy. "
3 " You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers. "
― M.J. Nicholls , The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die
4 " You know what writing is? Writing is sitting on a chair staring into space. Writing is two hours surfing the internet and five minutes typing. Writing is skim-reading ‘writing advice’ on websites and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is looking at your friends’ success and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and thinking you’re a genius. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and shouting ‘fuck you’ at the screen. Writing is £3500 college courses after which you pursue a career in telemarketing. Writing is something you either fucking do or you fucking don’t. Writing is listening to Tom Waits and wanting to be the literary equivalent. Writing is ending up as the literary equivalent of Bananarama. Writing is forty publishers saying you do not meet our needs at this time. Writing is meeting no one’s needs at any time. Writing is completing 2000 words one morning and weeping about never being able to write again the next. Writing is losing a whole day’s work to a decrepit Dell laptop. Writing is never having the time to write and never writing when you have the time. Writing is having one idea and coasting on that for months until another one comes along. Writing is never having any ideas. Writing is sitting at a bus stop and having four million ideas and not having a notebook to hand. Writing is laughing at the sort of people who keep notebooks on them at all times as if they are proper writers. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writin’ is fightin’. Writing is writing. "
5 " NR, Master of the backhanded compliment/putdown strikes again! "
6 " Writing is listening to Tom Waits and wanting to be the literary equivalent. Writing is ending up as the literary equivalent of Bananarama. "
7 " Paragraphs like this, in their infuriating insignificance, contribute to the unfocused incoherence of the novel: a form in which I revel in the most (if unfocused incoherence might be considered a “form”—I think it can—or an anti-form, if you won’t), for it asks nothing from the author except a consistent failure to pull things together in a satisfying manner, and forces the reader to strain hard to comprehend the author’s non-existent intentions, and justify their own heroic effort to stagger toward the end of the novel, even if only to write a scathing online review of the novel. I hope that makes no sense. "
8 " The tap of literature must keep running. The tap of literature must run in a violent frothing spurt and flood the universe, or we must blow out our brains. "
― M.J. Nicholls , Trimming England
9 " All right. I am Brian Lettsin and here is my story. I was working for I & I Books. It began innocently, with a few novels featuring bemused writers: their affairs, drinking problems, failure to produce their works, and so on. Nothing too harmful. Then I received this novel, A Postmodern Postmortem. Set in an afterlife for bad characters, the book was riddled with the kind of intertextual knowingness that was to set me on the path to destruction. There followed an orgiastic spree of metafucking—writers stepping into their novels to slap and screw their characters, writers appearing in other writers’ novels to do the same, then writers slapping and screwing the other writers in their novels, and characters taking over the narration of the novels and so on. One book, I Am the Novel, pushed me over the edge. Over ten thousand unidentified voices, zigzagging along the page, or huddled into spirals or boxes, even printed overlapping one another, squabbled for authorship, offering nothing in the manner of plot or character, or a conceivable point to the whole thing—one voice even cried out in orgasm ‘Oh! This is so pointless ... so ... oh oh oh! ... meeeeeaaaningleeeeeesss!’ epitomising the masturbatory emptiness at the heart of this publisher’s project. I suppose there was some theoretical logic behind these novels—I recall some drear pamphlet penned by the editor riddled with Derrida/Barthes references, as if cribbing from those two was a sufficient apologia for their gummy deluge—but this was too late for me. I Am the Novel, running at over 1000 pages, no author name on the cover, sent me into a spasm of self-doubt. I woke up having no idea who I was, if I was a character in a novel, if I had written a novel ... I cracked up. I spent my days staring into mirrors in the hope I might recall a mere snippet of the previous ‘life’ I was supposed to have led ... a life that is ... I am Brian ... hang on, who I am again? "
― M.J. Nicholls , The House of Writers
10 " These were times when the sheer splendour of language and the boundless potential of the human imagination to transcend the inexorable, horrendous dullness of a consumerist society in its death throes mattered more to readers than accessible plots and well-drawn characters and TV spin-offs. "
11 " Look, writing for me is two things: an act of genuflection, and an act of revenge. "
12 " I have to conclude, after fifteen years of philosophical inquiry, soaking up the finest minds in history, from Aristotle to Plato to Nietzsche to Zizek, after months spent pondering the most vexing conundrums ever devised by humankind, I have to conclude, that in the final analysis, life ain’t nuttin but money an’ fuck a bitch. "
13 " Yes, having to abandon a novel is painful. It causes an immense anger, usually aimed towards the author, and then at oneself for failing to appreciate a book probably called ‘dazzlingly inventive’ by some fucker in the Guardian. Keep away from social media. The urge to pan a novel and publicly humiliate the author for wasting your time is immense, but in the long run, the best revenge is to say nothing and read superior works. "
14 " I opened the John Green and read the first five pages. At first, I mistook my stomach pain for the aftermath of a chilli garlic chicken curry I had eaten that night, and powered on past page one, wincing at the knots, until I arrived at page five and vomited blood over the e-reader in the shape of a fractured heart. I doubled over, howling in pain. I could not believe a book could be that appalling. I screamed out: ‘I called this book a daring take on a controversial topic! I said this was a brave and beautiful novel to be cherished for decades to come!’ I clutched my stomach and screamed. I ran out onto the street, shouting nonsense, assaulting people who tried to help, eventually passing out in a motorway layby, covered in slime and scum, having leapt into a polluted pond to cleanse myself of the foulness that had overtaken me. Then I entered the most horrific dreams, the content of which I am not prepared to speak about and that I will take to the grave. "
15 " I understand the need to pass into the page. We are all wandering around this squalid planet with our little brains failing to fire at the right moment and our feet leading us into quarries filled with armed lunatics; running from barroom to courtroom with no shitting clue what led us to hack up a sailor’s pet rabbit with a machete, or torch an orphanage after watching It’s a Wonderful Life; and through these books, these beautiful books, we can create an alternative world in our heads, populated with the sort of vivacious rapscallions and fantastic fellows we’d never encounter at the bus stop, and make a home, plant a fucking flag, and live there, on our own private moon, floating forever above the earth, freeing ourselves from the stifling agony of having to fight to live in another fucker’s system. "
