Neel Mukherjee Quotes

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.

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 studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

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.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

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.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

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

'The Beach' novel, in my mind, was, in some respects, subversive.

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.

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

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

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.