Ben Dolnick Quotes

I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

A book makes claims of literary art.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

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

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

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

A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.