Justin Cartwright Quotes

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).

I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

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.'

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I prefer a great novel, but many novels come with a bunch of novel-y writerliness that feels sort of macho to me, so I do end up reading lots of shorter things.

I love Joyce Carol Oates. I love Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle. Arthur Phillips is always consistent.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.