Sarah Weinman Quotes

First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.

It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.

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

In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.

I recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.

I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

'Jekyll and Hyde' I read in high school. I was expecting a Hollywood-type horror story and couldn't believe it when I got this very complex narrative from all these different points of view.

The first time I read 'Leftovers,' I didn't get it at all.

Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.