Carolyn Chute Quotes

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

It's not that I'm apolitical... In my youth, I was a freelance political speechwriter, which taught me a lot about writing fiction, I must add.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.

All literature is gossip.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Part of what you try and do when you're writing is to just transcend politics and the moment in a way and talk about something, those fundamental building blocks of building nature.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.

Nursery rhymes were political when they were first written! To me, that's what it's about: it's about using it to say something more than just what the story is.

I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and they got broken down into my body, and I sweated it out. It's not because I want to talk about 'issues.' For me, a novel is a way of seeing the world.

The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

People have told me that the dialogue in '100 Bullets' is very realistic. I don't agree.

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

I have a novel out, 'Lupus Rex,' that I wrote and am excited about that.

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news.

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.