Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and Sappho. I always joke about this to my students, who can't quite wrap their mind around the fact that you can have a Ph.D in classics, but not do that full time. I never wanted to… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share
“An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share
“To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
“This consideration takes us very close to what it is that makes Greek tragedy “tragic.” A play about an unambiguously heroic young woman, someone’s mother or sister or daughter, squaring off against an unambiguously villainous general or king, a man greedy for military renown or for power, would not be morally interesting. What gives Antigone and Agamemnon and other plays… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share
In the pre-Internet age you had to find gay things - or things that were slightly radioactive with erotic interest. You had to go to the library, you had to find the books; you had to find the coded things. When everything's available and everything's okay, what does it become? It becomes shopping. We're shopping all the time, basically, whether… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share
“real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share
You come out of the gate, you've got something new, you're subversive, nobody's ever done it before. But by your fifth novel and your… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen… — Daniel Mendelsohn Copy Share Image
