Daniel Mendelsohn

I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

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…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“This consideration takes us very close to what it is that makes Greek tragedy “tragic.” A play about an unambiguously heroic young…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

In the pre-Internet age you had to find gay things - or things that were slightly radioactive with erotic interest. You had…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

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…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away,…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“sunt lacrimae rerum, “There are tears in things.”

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions:…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“I did and do believe, after all that I've seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things,…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

Opening things up not closing them off is my job. I'm doing that for my reader. You know, Bob Gottlieb always says,…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“the Holocaust wasn’t something that simply happened, but is an event that’s still happening.)”

— Daniel Mendelsohn

Repression is good for cultural achievement. Let's face it. What are gay boys going to be like? I always like to say…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“At night, I think about these things. I'm pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

“I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was…

— Daniel Mendelsohn