Stanley Elkin Quotes

#1. The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

Stanley Elkin

#2. I've always been terrified of dying, always. It was a concern of mine long before it had to be.

Stanley Elkin

#3. The furthest out is the only place to be.

Stanley Elkin

#4. I would never write about anyone who is not at the end of his rope.

Stanley Elkin

#5. Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

Stanley Elkin

#6. Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

Stanley Elkin

#7. Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart.

Stanley Elkin

#8. I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

Stanley Elkin

#9. Writing is an exercise in sculpture, chipping away at the rock until you find the nose.

Stanley Elkin

#10. It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads.

Stanley Elkin

#11. When I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which we visited in the summers. Everybody in that small community was named Feldman and was either an aunt or cousin of mine. I just found it comfortable to use the name Feldman.

Stanley Elkin

#12. I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.

Stanley Elkin

#13. The peculiar dignity of men seen eating alone in restaurants on national holidays

Stanley Elkin

#14. The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.

-Description of Doomsday

Stanley Elkin

#15. But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

Stanley Elkin

#16. Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.

Stanley Elkin

#17. What a writer's message is is totally unimportant. Either he is agreeing with life by affirming, or he is saying life is just a bowl of wormwood.

Stanley Elkin

#18. I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick - schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry

Stanley Elkin

#19. I look eight years older than everybody.

Stanley Elkin

#20. Even the sky a hybrid - here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

Stanley Elkin