Jeff Bezos Quotes

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

Of the birth of subgenres, there is no end. They arise like bubbles full of miraculous hopes and potentials from the Planckian foam of the canon, inspiring writers new and established alike.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

Vivian Abenshushan and Veronica Gerber write brilliant books that defy generic conventions.

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

All novels are experimental.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

I began writing as an experimental writer.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

Prose is in fact the museum where the dead images of verse are preserved. In 'Notes', prose is 'a museum where all the old weapons of poetry kept.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works