Ethan Coen Quotes

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

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

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

A book makes claims of literary art.

As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.

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.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored 'Dortmunder' novels, I wrote, 'His natural ability to observe human behavior and to follow an idea, no matter how bizarre, through to its proper, rightful finish echoed the vision of an architect.'

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.

In its rather clinical view of death, 'True Grit' rivals the hardboiled world of 'Red Harvest'-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.