- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Ben Dolnick Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feeling
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- Nov 07, 2020
For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.
- Giving
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- Nov 07, 2020
Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
- Den
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- Nov 07, 2020
Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.
- Find
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'
- Nov 07, 2020
There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
- Creations
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
'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.
- Death
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject - the death of a parent - without writing an entirely sad book.
- Enough
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.
- Hardest Thing
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- Nov 07, 2020
True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.
- Eating
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- Nov 07, 2020