Quote collection
92 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared."
"There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch."
"Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays."
"The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony."
"You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem."
"I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage."
"There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really."
"Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again."
"Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base."
"The function of a great library is to store obscure books."
"Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day."
"The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off."