Stanley Elkin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stanley Elkin

Stanley Elkin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stanley Elkin on Wise Famous Quotes.

Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart.

It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads.

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.

Writing is an exercise in sculpture, chipping away at the rock until you find the nose.

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

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.

-Description of Doomsday

I've always been terrified of dying, always. It was a concern of mine long before it had to be.

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

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.

The peculiar dignity of men seen eating alone in restaurants on national holidays

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

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

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.

I look eight years older than everybody.

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.

The furthest out is the only place to be.