Ben Dolnick Quotes:- Ben Dolnick (born 1982) is an American fiction writer and author of the novels Zoology (2007), You Know Who You Are (2011), and At the Bottom of Everything: A Novel (2013).
Inspirational Ben Dolnick Quotes
“In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.”
Ben Dolnick
“I’ve sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, and stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.”
Ben Dolnick
“Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.”
Ben Dolnick
“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
“For me, novel writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, and 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
“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
“The patron saint of outlining – the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock – is P. G. Wodehouse.”
Ben Dolnick
30+ Famous Quotes by Ben Dolnick
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“During a 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
“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
20+ Best Quotes on Ben Dolnick
“There’s something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.”
Ben Dolnick
“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
“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
“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
“A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.”
Ben Dolnick
“Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.”
Ben Dolnick
Best Quotes on Ben Dolnick
“Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikeable 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
“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
“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
“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
“‘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
“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
