28 Quotes by Stanley Elkin

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.-Description of Doomsday

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.

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

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism. There is no particular religious tradition in my work. There is only one psychological assertion that I would insist upon. That is: the SELF takes precedence.

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

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.

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.

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.

The furthest out is the only place to be.