Photo by Carolyn Kraft
“Fiction is like a trust fall. Sometimes the story catches you and sometimes it doesn’t…and you wake up with a bump on your head.”
“Why is calling something realistic a compliment? Just because something’s realistic doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Everything that talks about the human situation is political.”
“The point of every story is that there are two sides of things, both good and bad, optimistic and pessimistic.”
“I tend to write when I’m upset about something.”
“I spent fifteen hours on a plane to Argentina with a fat German next to me who farted the entire time.”
“Freeze your jeans. Kills the germs from farting.”
“Eventually every Wikipedia article leads to squid.”
“The Internet is a terrible distraction for writers.”
“Starting is just about writing sentences, collecting voices. Need to be comfortable being in the dark.”
“People really want short stories. They buy novels, but really they don’t want them.”
“Reading a work in translation is like kissing someone through a handkerchief…which does have a kinky charm to it.”
“Robert Louis Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver on a friend with all of his finer qualities removed.”
“Fiction is the exploration of the self in the world.”
“All of us are many people and writing is a way to expose our other personalities.”
“You know who’s got great beer? The Czech Republic. You should go there.”
“I write with the feeling that the book could go anywhere, that the whole premise could change in the middle of a sentence.”
“Form is what makes fiction transcendent.”
“As Robert Frost wrote, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'”
“Does reading have to be a totally immersive experience? Can’t it be ‘I like this story/I like this sentence.’?”
“I like transparency in art, the idea of knowing that this was created by someone. Jackson Pollack included his own detritus in his paintings: tobacco, dirt, lint. It’s nice to feel like you’re interacting with the creation of the work.”
“There’s this whole idea of momentum in modern fiction, that the writer has to pick a reader up and carry him or her forward and then drop them off at a certain point, unchanged, probably, at the most a bit breathless and flushed.”
The preceding witticisms and wisdom were recorded on a miniature yellow notebook on Sunday April 22 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The purveyors of said perspicacity were an anonymous festival-goer and the following authors: Etgar Keret, Sara Levine, Ben Loory, Amelia Gray, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Ehrenreich, Mark Leyner, and Aimee Bender.
