Jay Parini Quotes

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

The original version of 'The White Mountains' was probably just about worth publishing.

I wasn't going to be a college kid. The only subject I was interested in was English. I think I had a subconscious interest in analyzing story.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.