Quotes by Ben Dolnick - Page 1

In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
Ben Dolnick /
Tension
Tranquility
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A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.
Ben Dolnick /
Sentences
Formulate
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Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.
Ben Dolnick /
Visceral
Hate People Way
Biological
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There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.
Ben Dolnick /
Ordinary
Standards
Likable
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Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
Ben Dolnick /
Dubious
Positively
Merely
Prizes
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The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.
Ben Dolnick /
Outlining
Patron
Saint
Patron Saint
Sings
Siren
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I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.
Ben Dolnick /
Saul
Wandered
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I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.
Ben Dolnick /
Scraps
Sold
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One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.
Ben Dolnick /
Outline
Voices
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A social worker named Cosette Rae, along with a therapist named Hilarie Cash, founded 'ReSTART' in what, until then, had been Rae's house.
Ben Dolnick /
Cash
Founded
Worker
Named
Therapist
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Collections
Meant To Be
Time Long Look
Time Look Long
Precisely
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If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.
Ben Dolnick /
Bottom
Fatherhood
Philip
Author
Bets
List
Placing
Roth
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Artistic
Endeavor
Humbling
Infuriating
Never Forget
Slowness
Thanks
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Bottom
Hopeful
Lessons
Whim
Occasionally
Piano Lessons
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Enrichment
Relief
Time Day Children
Offered
Zoo
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Parent
Entirely
Struggling
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'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.
Ben Dolnick /
Child Actors
London
Plot
Sorry
Stage
Backs
For The People
Temple
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Atonement
Hardest Thing
Mistake
Shaving
Stupid
Again
True
Doing
Same
Making
Periodic
Requires
The Hardest Thing
Via
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Garbage
Sneakers
Usual
Work Morning Me
Array
Presents
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Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.
Ben Dolnick /
Lonely
Mysterious
Pastime
Actual
Distracting
Sufficiently
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Code
Crank
Enabling
Lunch
Work Hard Work Game
No Secret
Unlock
Video Game
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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?
Ben Dolnick /
Assemblage
Gears
Mere
Observation
Respectful
True Nature
Wild
Creature
Discern
Intentions
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Devoted
Handful
Self Pity
Sentimentality
Admit
Appealing
Bright
Region
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Eclectic
Nine
Output
Literary
Fitzgerald
Holding
Inclined
Shelf
Stretched
Thin
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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.'
Ben Dolnick /
Considering
Dinner Party
Invite
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Furious
Mickey
Philip
Profane
Sabbath
Compared
Cottage
Creations
Earlier
Protagonist
Roth
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Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.
Ben Dolnick /
Bolts
Fling
Nuts
Work People More
Aspiring
Literary
Inevitably
Packed
Readily
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Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer's 'Endless Love', you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager's diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important.
Ben Dolnick /
Loud
Opening
Tone
Diary
Scott
Spencer
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Butterfly
Crude
Release
Storm
Violation
Committee
Den
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Educational
Ought
Author
Doubly
Simultaneously
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Desert
Gloomy
Misguided
Setting
Nature Myself Me
Assuring
Contains
Foot
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A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on you; at least you can say that you're halfway through and know that this maps onto some clear, visualizable chunk of narrative.
Ben Dolnick /
Halfway
Maps
Narrative
Good Will Know
Chunk
Good Parts
Onto
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Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.
Ben Dolnick /
Arms
Freshman
Handwriting
Motto
Bright
Coat
Scribble
Tortured
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Agonizing
Hopeless
Chapter
Proved
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Drunk
Enrichment
Giddy
Goats
Peanut Butter
Presenting
Trash
Butter
Meant
Cow
Emerge
Heads
Peanut
Zoo
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Middle School
Missing
Pages
Associations
Distributed
Linger
Short Stories
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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.
Ben Dolnick /
Chosen
Work Your Doing
Work Doing Your
Habits
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When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.
Ben Dolnick /
Environmental
Animal
Chickens
Cows
Eating
Irresponsibility
Meat
Pigs
Reason
Size
Worst
Assumed
Bit
Bad
Basically
Less
Correspond
Good Reason
Harmless
Researching
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We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.
Ben Dolnick /
Born
Cheer
Humans
Manageable
Movement
Predictable
Sick
Sugar
Weak
Fat
Lots
Animals
Antsy
Bodies
Both
Complex
Confine
Give
Put
Problems
Whose
Workings
Zoo
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Ben Dolnick Quotes - Page 1

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