Ben Dolnick Quotes
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Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikable characters, but compared with Mickey Sabbath, the furious and profane protagonist of 'Sabbath's Theater,' Roth's earlier creations seem like Winnie the Pooh.
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A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.
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Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
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During the couple of years it took to write 'At The Bottom of Everything', I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.
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The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.
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Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from the shelf with a single stretched hand. You'd be holding an eclectic bunch.
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'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.
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I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.
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Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.
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In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
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We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.
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There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.
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Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
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To learn a piece on the piano - even a simple one - has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a chapter in a book, every bit as tedious and hopeless and halting. But this is not to say that the piano hasn't helped my writing. It has, just not in the ways I expected.