Sarah Weinman Quotes

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

It's easy to make something avant garde. To do something in the traditional way is much more brave in the sense that you're - your technique is so much more exposed because there's not all this flashy stuff to distract the viewer.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

All novels are experimental.

I just appreciate what Andre 3000 has done musically - just the bravery. I think Andre 3000 may be one of the bravest artists in rap music.

I began writing as an experimental writer.

I love Grace Jones. She's everything.

I didn't have to inspire John toward the avant-garde; he did not need anything from me. That is why it's so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At some point the members of the quartet felt it was time for a change, and left on their own.

I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.

If you put a blank canvas in front of Matisse and say, 'This has to be a success,' who's going to pick up a paintbrush?

I love doing supercrazy, avant-garde but still stunning looks.

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years. This time, though, it's different. He's burst into the clear and is taking seven-league strides across the literary landscape.

We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.

When you publish something, it is very much as if you pulled your pants down in public. If what you have written is good, nobody can hurt you; if what you have written is bad, nobody can help you.

We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

There was an old brochure for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with a quote from Robert Redford or someone, that said, "You're only as good as you dare to be bad."

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.