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.
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.
I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.
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.
Enrichment happened to be my favorite time of day in the Children's Zoo, since it offered relief from the security-guard-esque standing around that makes up most of a zookeeper's day.
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.
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.
In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.
To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.
There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.
For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.
Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.
A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?
Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.
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.'
Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.