Books Quote by Michiko Kakutani

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Two things can keep the common reader going, argument or story. (Both are always involved, however subtly, in good fiction.)”

— John Gardner

“Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of…

— Anonymous

“I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's…

— Flannery O'Connor

“You should really restrict these flights of fancy to your fiction, where I can redline them on grounds of verbosity and excessive allusion.”

— M. Pierce

“Critics are eager to discover a new voice. For some reason they're just as eager to be disappointed by a second novel.”

— Olivia Goldsmith

“I‘ve always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of…

— Jonathan Lethem

“That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell,…

— David Foster Wallace

“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always…

— Carl von Clausewitz

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of…

— H. L. Mencken

“Agenda-driven novelists don’t often want to bother learning the craft of fiction. They’re just dipping into fiction long enough to disguise their +2 mace…

— Jeff Gerke