Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All art is theft.
I'm a sucker for sports movies.
The only rule is never be bored.
My medium is prose, not the novel.
Genre is a minimum security prison.
A book makes claims of literary art.
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
Anything processed by memory is fiction.
I like art with a visible string to the world.
We hunger for connection to a larger community.
Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.
People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.
Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful.
Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.
I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.
The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.
Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.
To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.
With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.