Helen Vendler Quotes

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.

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

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

A book makes claims of literary art.

The problem with themes is that writers don't realise they are themes until someone points them out.

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

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

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

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

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

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

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

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

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

My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

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.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Alan Moore's writing is almost novelistic. It's very intricate and wordy and smart.