‎"The fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, had been nearly everything) … narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—was a basic evolutionary tool of survival." - Aleksandar Hemon

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.” - Adrienne Rich

Reality Hunger by David Shields
Sean O'Hagan is intrigued by a bold book that rails against the confines of traditional fiction
The Observer, Saturday 27 February 2010

"David Shields is bored by the novel. As a form, he argues, it tends to be too hidebound by plot, too traditional and old-fashioned to reflect the speed of 21st-century culture. He is particularly bored by the well-wrought, beautifully written literary novel, as exemplified by Ian McEwan's Atonement and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

"'I read these books and my overwhelming feeling is, you've got to be kidding,' he told the Observer recently. "They strike me as antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian novel mode. In no way do they convey what if feels like to live in the 21st century. Like most novels, they are essentially works of nostalgic entertainment"...

FICTION RUINED MY FAMILY by Jeanne Darst – review and excerpt

Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times:
"As its title indicates, 'Fiction Ruined My Family' adds a literary aspect to these standard-issue ingredients (her parents’ alcoholism, social pretensions, delusional behavior and financial instability, among other things). The author’s father, Stephen Darst, wanted so badly to write that he moved his family from St. Louis to Amagansett, Long Island, a better place for what he called 'getting the novel together.' It’s not exactly clear why he deemed this setting more conducive to his work, but Ms. Darst found herself 'living on a farm, which I would quickly discover had more New Yorker writers on it than cows and chickens.' A line like that is reason enough to forget the Augusten Burroughs version and start reading Ms. Darst on her own merits..."


Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst – review
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/books/fiction-ruined-my-family-by-jeanne-darst-review.html?_r=1&ref=books


Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst– excerpt
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/books/excerpt-fiction-ruined-my-family-by-jeanne-darst.html?ref=books

"It's quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology." 
- Noah Chomsky, via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.


-Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

"I just write a song and I know it's going to be all right. I don't even know what it's going to say."

— Bob Dylan, 1965, KQED-TV