Ellen Goodman Quotes

It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Minor writers think style is all.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I hated 'The Lovely Bones'. I thought her vision of Heaven was amazingly uninspired and very depressing. The book was just tedious.

There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

I don't want to write books that are intellectually staggering if nobody's going to read them.

You can't argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that's true. But just because you can't, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn't mean they're not important.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

It would, of course, be wrong to say that the arts have no social value. They have tremendous power and can often, indirectly, make our world a better place to live in.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.