93 Quotes by Anne Fadiman

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I'm independent, I'm not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I'm an old-fashioned amateur.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.