Stanley Elkin Quotes

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

- Stanley Elkin

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

- Stanley Elkin

When I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which we visited in the summers. Everybody in that small community was named Feldman and was either an aunt or cousin of mine. I just found it comfortable to use the name Feldman.

- Stanley Elkin

The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

- Stanley Elkin

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.

- Stanley Elkin

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

- Stanley Elkin

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

- Stanley Elkin