Brian J. Smith Quotes

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

It just seemed like Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism - because that's mainly what I've been exposed to - was a real solid organization of teachings to point someone in the right direction. Some real well thought out stuff. But I don't know, like, every last detail about Buddhism.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.

I play basketball on Sundays and I'm a very spiritual guy; I read a lot of Eastern philosophy and I meditate.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

I love philosophy and spirituality and leveling-up books and science books.

When I was in grad school, I had to admit I hadn't read Toni Morrison. My teacher, the novelist Colum McCann, said I had to. I read 'Beloved' and 'Song of Solomon.' Pretty incredible.

In non-fiction, I like Wayne Dyer. I have a compilation of his best quotes near my bed! To me he's one of the finest authors.

Murakami's ability to deconstruct and his aesthetic and conceptual freedom have been totally inspiring for me.

At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

Strength, strength is what the Upanishads speak to me from every page. This is the one great thing to remember, it has been the one great lesson I have been taught in my life; strength, it says, strength, O man, be not weak. Are there no human weaknesses? - says man. There are, say the Upanishads, but will more weakness heal them, would you try to wash dirt with dirt? Will sin cure sin, weakness cure weakness? Strength, O man, strength, say the Upanishads, stand up and be strong.