Ben Dolnick Quotes

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

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

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

There's no literary merit in my books.

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

I don't understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

Anne Carson and Angela Carter are folks I hold close to my heart because they have such unique ways of telling stories.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

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'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

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.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

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

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

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.