A Quote by Michael Dirda
A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
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You have to remember that Shadow and Bone' was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.
Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a 'fantasy' novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense. Rutabaga.
I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.
Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.
People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will.
I'm glad that, despite everything, I was able to get work done and finish something. I never finish anything. So just being able to finish record and to make music is a great gift.
You can finish school, and even make it easy - but you never finish your education, and it's seldom easy.
I remember finding 'Harold and Maude' strangely erotic. I've always had an octogenarian fetish.
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.
I have always taken it very easy, believed in myself. Whatever I bring to the table, I put my heart and soul into it.
There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
I still viewed myself as a reviewer when I was on radio. Was it appropriate for me? I think the answer is it's only inappropriate if I allowed it to affect my film reviewing. I don't think you will find any studio that said, 'Yeah, he went easy on us because he was shopping a script.'
When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn't have feelings, I had certainties.
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