Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
How wonderful it would be to scatter words as they rise to consciousness, to let them lie where they fall. — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality,… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
With prurient absorption and only minimal risk, we can pretend to be the subject of the lead article on the front page of the… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
The best liars lie with their eyes rather than with their words. This might put writers at a disadvantage. — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read. — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency. — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
When we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate… — Joanna Scott Copy Share Image
