Debra Granik Quotes

'Knockemstiff' is a collection of short stories set in the holler of the same name in southern Ohio where I grew up. I tried to link the stories together through the place and some recurring characters.

I'd like to read a book sometime. I've never read a book before. That'd be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I've got to do that sometime.

A good book is a good book. End of story.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

If I had to pick, I'd say my favorite book is 'A Prayer For Owen Meany', by John Irving.

I've seen 'Fried Green Tomatoes' too many times. I love life stories told in flashback.

It's embarrassing to admit how many times I've reread the following: 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,' '1984,' 'Lord of the Flies,' 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,' 'Germinal,' 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle,' and 'A Moveable Feast.'

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

I have read your book and much like it.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

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.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' by Mitch Albom - I read it in eight hours and blubbed my eyes out when it finished. I've thought about the story every day since.

A novel is about people.

I recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.

A novel is not a rant.

'Dhadak' has its own individuality and a story that deserves to be told to a larger audience.

I remember reading 'Catcher in the Rye,' but I don't think I got it.

I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.