Ross Douthat Quotes

The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.

Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

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.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

Literature has become my life.

Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

Like most writers, I read deeply into the genre in which I write.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

We're writing a book together. She just finished one. Did you read it? Among the Porcupines?

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

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

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.