Stanley Elkin Quotes

#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. 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

#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. Not all animal brides are doomed. Not all men are greedy or violent or possessive.

Delia Sherman

#5. Shepherd's pie'? 'Chili special'? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won't eat it. He's seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish's flesh.

Anthony Bourdain

#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. When we fail we pursue the success.
When we succeed we party.

Debasish Mridha

#10. Anger and shame laced with loneliness spread throughout her, heating her to the core. Self-pity wasn't something Bess would normally succumb to, but things in the past few months had fallen apart, and there was no one there to help pick up the pieces.

Inger Iversen

#11. It's been quite the experience for two brothers who were Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, who had no idea that they were going to end up in the entertainment industry. To be where we are now, making features, TV shows and getting a hundred million views online is kind of an amazing thing.

Rafi Fine

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

Stanley Elkin

#13. 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

#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. 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

#17. The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

Haruki Murakami

#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. He misses her so much that sometimes he can't bear existing in his own body.

Fredrik Backman

#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. The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.

Camille Paglia

#25. 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

#26. Oh, sweet emotions, gentle harmony, goodness and peace of the
softened heart, melting bliss of the first raptures of love, where are they,
where are they?

Ivan Turgenev

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

Stanley Elkin

#28. I think we will begin to see some real efforts made to do things like protecting Social Security and Medicare.

John Dingell

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

Stanley Elkin

#30. [W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve.

Anne Lamott

#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