Ben Dolnick Quotes

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.

I was reading some Raymond Carver. I really liked how he did that 'slice of life' thing. Because I'm not much of a reader I end up finding out about these things a long time after other people.

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.