Category Archives: Quotes

Quotes

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“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.”
– Andrea Barrett, “The Art of Fiction 180,” interview by Elizabeth Gaffney, The Paris Review 168 Winter 2003

Quotes

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“Gary [Lutz] was the first writing teacher I had who showed me that the sentence was capable of art. He would underline good sentences and interrogate bad ones. Verbs would be circled and Gary would ask ‘inevitable?’ And no, the verb was not inevitable, and I’d never considered that concept before, inevitability. It smacks of the eternal, a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits.”
– Dylan Nice, “An Interview with Dylan Nice,” interview by Rachel Yoder, Bookslut March 2013

[See Vladimir Nabokov and William Gaddis.]

Quotes

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“Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.”
– Terry Eagleton, Rev. of Derrida: A Biography, by Benoît Peeters. The Guardian 14 November 2012