Quotes for All
Julio’s Day is a story of one man’s life, but it’s a great more than that as well. It’s the story of the life of a century, also told as if a day. Beginning with Julio’s birth in 1900 and ending with his death in 2000, the graphic novel touches on most of the major … Read more
Philosophy does provide me a structure and a way of thinking. Religion – like the religion I grew up with, Mormonism – also provides a way of thinking. And I think those two structures – one highly logical, the other anything but – are always part of my thought process as I’m putting together a … Read more
I read individual stories a lot in magazines and other places, too, but I really think there’s something to be said for reading story collections as collections. That’s not true of all story collections, to be honest, but for good ones I think it often is true. Brian Evenson
One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn’t necessarily reveal what it’s doing with rhythm and sound and patterning. Brian Evenson
I’m pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I’m writing where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really … Read more
Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they’re from books, sometimes they’re just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they’re biographical, or sometimes they’re other things [everyday life]. Brian Evenson
Any time I put together a story collection, I don’t know what it’s going to look like overall – or even what the title story is going to be. Over time, I end up with a dozen or so stories, and I start to see a shape to them, how they fit together, and then … Read more
Like a cross between Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee’s Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which … Read more
I don’t think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief–if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer … Read more
When I say I’m instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I’m doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled. Brian Evenson