Quotes About Elkin

#1. Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: 'Stop vamping.' It has remained a caution.

Adam Ross

#2. At the table just to get a laugh out of the younger children present (meaning Annabelle and me). For the record, I do not actually laugh when Elkin passes gas; I gag and it comes out as a laugh. Annabelle, I cannot vouch for. Good

Wendy Mass

#3. 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

#4. What worries me is that I am not sure any of the Republicans, or any Democrat, is ready to 'go to the mats.' And, ergo, I am concerned that our current leaders are simply incapable of creating a winning war strategy.

Rick Elkin

#5. Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Salman Rushdie

#6. 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

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

Stanley Elkin

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

-Description of Doomsday

Stanley Elkin

#9. 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

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

Stanley Elkin

#11. 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

#12. All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf.

Helen Thomas

#13. The premise that America's power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America's magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy.

Rick Elkin

#14. 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

#15. I look eight years older than everybody.

Stanley Elkin

#16. It's only five rappers out of Atlanta who bussin and I'm one of 'em; the other four you know who you are; but if you gotta think twice (well) shawty ya ain't nice; regardless of ya publishin' deal ya can't write

T.I.

#17. 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

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

Stanley Elkin

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

Stanley Elkin

#20. No troubles has come my way
touching wood. He rapped the counter sharply with his knuckles.

Agatha Christie

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Stanley Elkin

#24. 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

#25. Every man dies. Not every man lives.

Anthony Robbins

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

Stanley Elkin

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

Stanley Elkin

#28. It's like driving a car with your foot on the brake.

Allen Elkin

#29. [...]this whole world is sustained only for the sake of Jesus Christ, his Word, and his message.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#30. I have a black belt in sarcasm, and my wit is like lightning.

N.R. Walker

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

Stanley Elkin

#32. 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

#33. The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don't create it. You don't define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it - or bow to it.

John Piper