Michelle Dean Quotes

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

I'm not a writer who refuses to talk about a book until I've finished.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

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

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

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

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

All literature is gossip.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.