Alfred Kazin Quotes

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.

I don't want to protect my characters. I don't do it with Muslims, either. My job is not to make us look perfect. My job is to make us look messy.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

Everyone likes fantasy to get away from everyday life, but I think 'Game of Thrones' is not like fairies and unicorns. It's very relatable to everyday life. It's not too fantastic - just a little bit.

It's great to have loads of Marvel movies, but the movies that reflect our lives - that's why I came to the movies, and that's what I love. I want to see stories about my life being reflected back at me, and there's not that many of those anymore. It's a real shame.

'Top Boy,' for some people, was very controversial because it seemed to be portraying black people in a certain light that they thought to be stereotypical. However, what I would say is that the writer went and lived in Hackney in East London for a long time and did his research really well.

If you make an authentic political film, which talks of real people and real events, in a politically conscious country like India, it is but natural that people will react to it in different ways and there will be a collage of opinions.

I'm not interested in making 'black' movies. I'm interested in making movies that reflect reality as I perceive it.

Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.

Troubled times do call for troubled songs, songs that unsettle our souls and our spirits unapologetically.

When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.

There's no perfect place, there's no wonderful utopia.

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork . . . the truth.

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists.

The times change, and to the extent that comedy captures the spirit of the times, it will enjoy success.

The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled "poor." He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids.