Jay Parini Quotes

Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction.

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.

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.

There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.

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've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Fleabag' is its own genre. It isn't comedy. It isn't drama. It isn't even tragi-comedy.

Regency literature was too coal-y for me, too long-winded and describey. I preferred modern books where you had to read other books explaining what the first book meant to know what happened.

I like going absurd pretty quickly. You don't waste any time when you're doing theater of the ridiculous.

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

Anything by D. H. Lawrence or Jean Genet - 'Zen Mind,' 'Beginner's Mind' is my daily go to for non-fiction.

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.

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.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

I've waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, 'Third Class Superhero.'

I'll come out and say it because no one else will: French gross-out humor is the best. Particularly the illustrated variety.

I love David Lynch movies, and I like Haruki Murakami books.

Here's my take on Andy Kaufman... For Kaufman, comedy was a skill that was open for examination. He didn't just do comedy, he deconstructed it like it was a transistor set. He pulled out all the wires and switched them around, often in front of our very eyes.

Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn't really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn't interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It's surreal, it's absurd, it's wordplay, it's satirical, it's analyzing itself, it's funny, it's an enormous challenge.

I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.

Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.